The final goal of terminology work is the collection of all information necessary to the harmonisation of the specialised terms used for supranational and international communication in the fields of spatial planning and sustainable development in each of the four working languages of the Alpine Convention (French, German, Italian and Slovene).
Terminology work is carried out by the LexALP partners from different locations with the help of a dedicated terminology data base and interface. The LexALP Term Bank is based on the Papillon model, which has been adapted to suit concept-oriented and harmonisation-oriented terminology work on four languages and on six national as well as more than one supranational legal system.
Exploiting the linguistic and legal data stored in the LexALP corpus, terminology work starts with the semi-automatic extraction of relevant terminology used at Alpine Convention level. Terms are classified on the basis of the LexALP structure for corpus and term bank and described first at supranational and international level. Equivalences at national level are subsequently analysed and compared, so as to elaborate harmonisation proposals (quadruplets of translation equivalents) that are eventually submitted to the Harmonisation Group for final validation.
Terminologists and experts – representing all languages and legal systems under analysis – jointly process relevant terms through a specific web interface, which serves both for processing as well as displaying multilingual and multilegal terminology. The terminology collections are made accessible to external users; dedicated filter criteria ensure easy retrieval of desired term collections by means of the different classification criteria (language, subject field, legal system, etc.). For more detailed information, see also the LexALP term bank user guide.