Quality in Terminology: a Question of Consistency? A Case Study on EU Victim-related Texts

Legal multilingualism within the EU is based on the widely accepted principle of equality of authentic texts, which have the same legal force and are thus expected to convey the same meaning. In this regard, it is to be acknowledged that the equally authentic texts building the acquis communautaire are not the result of multilingual legal drafting, which would involve 23 official languages, but rather the product of translation or, as some authors may prefer, \u201cinterlingual text reproduction\u201d (Kj\ue6r 2007). In order to ensure intelligible and consistent legislation, in 2003 the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of legislation within the Community institutions was published. Considering that in its Guideline 6 the Guide recommends an inter- and intra-textually consistent usage of terminology, a contrastive analysis of a selection of English and Italian terms extracted from victim-related EU acts will be conducted. The approach of this analysis will be parole-oriented and descriptive, and consequently different from traditional prescriptive multilingual terminological work, whose purpose is to examine specialized languages in order to select the most suitable equivalents in a specific field to be collected in a repository to be used by translators and technical writers. The main aim of the analysis is to observe the terms or other linguistic strategies which are used in the Italian texts to reproduce English domain-specific terms in order to shed light on terminological variation and different forms of interlingual lexical inconsistency in Italian texts, even when the latter maintain conceptual coherence when compared to the English texts. On the basis of such an analysis, an attempt is made to evaluate quality from a terminological perspective. Since no single definition of quality \u2013 especially in language-based professions \u2013 is available, for the purposes of this study quality is intended as the adequacy of terminological solutions adopted to guarantee \u201ctotal concordance\u201d (Vlachopoulos 2008) among different linguistic versions of the same legal texts, also in the light of the Guideline\u2019s recommendation to maintain formal and substantive consistency in the usage of terminology in EU acts