Terminological equivalence in European, British and Italian criminal law texts: A case study on victims of crime

Since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, cooperation in the fields of justice and home affairs has become a matter of high priority for all Member States of the European Union. This cooperation finds its concrete expression in a number of important legal instruments adopted by EU institutions, which are already, or are currently being, implemented in the Member States. EU legal instruments represent sources of law used to approximate the laws and regulations of the Member States. However, the EU’s intervention in different legal subfields cannot prevent differences from being identified among the legal systems involved (EU’s supranational and Member States’ national legal systems). A terminological analysis of an English-Italian corpus of EU texts dealing with the legal subfield of the standing of victims in criminal proceedings and their rights allows the identification of differences in the Italian and British implementation strategies and in their way of conceptualising even relevant key elements such as “victim”. This paper, which is part of an ongoing PhD research project, illustrates the main characteristics of bilingual legal terminology in a multi-judicial framework (conceptual asymmetries, different degrees of equivalence, synonymy and polysemy) and presents the current research work by showing a few examples of legal/cultural gaps, which necessarily need to be taken into account when translating or mediating between the two cultures/languages.