Capturing dynamism in legal terminology: the case of victims of crime

In the last decade, EU legislators have been devoting increasing attention to victims of crime and their rights. The purpose of this study is to focus on English victim-related terminology and identify cases of terminological dynamism which can cause potential difficulties to legal translators. Although the EU and the national legal systems co-exist in and regulate the same judicial space, the terminology used is not shared by all the systems. The absence of a priori established equivalent terminologies may make it difficult for translators to map legal concepts to the appropriate legal system. The study therefore aims at highlighting the need for resources specifically designed for legal translators and presents MuLex, a legal translation-oriented TKB in which multilingual data are accompanied by conceptual maps underlying intra-linguistic asymmetries and different degrees of cross-linguistic equivalence.