WHEN LANGUAGE BECOMES LAW: THE METHODOLOGY AND CRITERIA ADOPTED BY THE SOUTH TYROLEAN TERMINOLOGY COMMISSION FOR THE STANDARDISATION OF GERMAN AND ITALIAN TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS

WHEN LANGUAGE BECOMES LAW: THE METHODOLOGY AND CRITERIA ADOPTED BY THE SOUTH TYROLEAN TERMINOLOGY COMMISSION FOR THE STANDARDISATION OF GERMAN AND ITALIAN TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS South Tyrol is a part of Northern Italy where a large German-speaking minority lives. In 1972 the local population was granted the right to use the minority language with the public administration, in court and in all realms of public life (DPR 672/1972). An urgent need for a clear and consistent German legal language that faithfully reflected the Italian legal system ensued. The task of responding to such “terminological emergency” was assigned to a commission of six legal experts and translators (DPR 574/1988), who were to officially validate (i.e. standardise) the German language equivalents to the existing legal and administrative Italian terms. The use of the newly standardised terminology is mandatory for all public bodies. After about 20 years of activity, the proposed paper aims at analysing the results obtained and difficulties faced by the Commission during their daunting task of creating a German language terminology to express the concepts of Italian law with a constant view to the neighbouring well-established German speaking legal systems. The paper will illustrate the decision-making process, term selection criteria and strategies of neology as well as discuss the procedural problems and terminological inconsistencies on the basis of real examples.

recognised as having the right to preserve its ethnic heritage and to pursue its economic and cultural development in the frame of autonomous executive and legislative powers.Herein lie the roots of South Tyrolean autonomy.

The first Statute of Autonomy
The First Statute of Autonomy, approved in January 1948, aimed at implementing the principles and obligations laid down in the Paris Agreement.In fact, even though the Statute declared a series of principles, such as the possibility of using the German language with the local public bodies and authorities (art.85) and of teaching of the minority language in all schools (art.15), it did not sufficiently enforce the guarantees envisaged by the Agreement.The use of the German language in the public administration, in court and especially with the police, remained very limited.
Serious problems ensued also from the decision to apply the Statute not only to the Province of Bolzano, where most minority language speakers resided, but to the entire region, comprising both the Provinces of Bolzano and Trento.However, the Province of Trento being largely Italian speaking, conferring broad decisional powers to the regional bodies instead of the provincial bodies gave the Italian speaking group a solid majority.As a consequence, many decisions concerning the language minority were weakened or made hardly effective.The German speaking population suffered strongly from the situation and reacted with fierce political and diplomatic struggles.Mainly during the 1960s and 1970s extremist groups even organised terrorist attacks and bombings in protest.

The New Statute of Autonomy
The 1948 Statute was discussed and revised for many years, until in 1972 the New Statute of Autonomy was released as Decree of the President of the Republic n. 670/1972.The main revolution in the New Statute is that article 99 confers the German language the same status as Italian.A more general principle explicitly grants equal rights to all citizens, whatever language community they belong to (art.2).The German speaking citizens in the province of Bolzano are recognised as having the right to use their native language when dealing with the public administration and the bodies of the judiciary located in the province (art.100).The main difference with the First Statute is that a mere possibility of using the minority language in public life becomes a fully-fledged right of the German speaking community.16 years later, the Decree of the President of the Republic n. 574/1988 laid down several practical dispositions to regulate the daily use of German with the public authority.Such provisions, in particular those concerning trials to be held in German (or in the two official languages according to the partiesʼ requests), stressed the urgent need for a complete and consistent legal and administrative terminology in German that would faithfully convey the concepts of the Italian legal system.To respond to this need, the Decree created a dedicated commission for terminology (art.6), the Commissione Paritetica di Terminologia.

The Terminology Commission and the standardisation workflow
This Terminology Commission consists of six experts, three Italian and three German native speakers.The Italian speaking members are chosen by the Commissario del Governo, who represents the Italian state locally, whereas the German speaking ones are appointed by the local provincial government.Three of the members are translators, while the others are senior judges or lawyers.Their role is to determine and update or validate the legal, administrative and technical terminology used by the public authorities to ensure its correspondence in Italian and German.3Also, the Commission is required to write and update a dictionary of legal, administrative and technical terminology in the two languages (DPR 574/88,art. 6,par. 1).The internal regulations stress that the Commissionʼs main task is to decide the equivalent German language terms for the already existing Italian legal, administrative and technical terms and to determine -in the case of new terminology -the equivalent terms in both languages (art.1).
The Commission works on the basis of accurate and complete terminology work (see 1.4), which they use to draft lists of bilingual terms (Fig 1 .).These lists provide a translation equivalent for every Italian legal term.They treat thematically related concepts and are numbered progressively (e.g.list number 7 deals with the terminology of penal law, list number 8 with penal procedure law, etc.).The Commissario del Governo and the local government then receive the lists and have six months time to amend or integrate them where necessary.After this period, if no comment or complaint has been voiced by the two revising authorities, the lists are to be considered approved (DPR 574/88,art. 6,par. 2).At this point they can be published in the Official Journal of the Region and become legally binding.Every law, regulation, official document or provision drafted in both Italian and German after the publication should use the terminology established by the Commission.

Terminology standardisation
The activity of the Commission consists in terminology standardisation, as defined by the DIN standard (2342/1992: 5.4.2):"Normung von Begriffen und ihren Benennungen sowie von Begriffssystemen und den dazugehörigen Benennungssystemen oder Nomenklaturen". 4Their work is to officially validate single designations or entire concept systems with their "linguistic labels", i.e. the terms.The results are pairs of translation equivalents of legal and administrative terms in Italian and German that express -within the South Tyrolean context and the Italian legal system -exactly the same concept in both languages.
Different requirements had to be considered when attempting to create a new German legal language for South Tyrol: • newly created terms should reflect as much as possible the meaning expressed by the Italian terms; • the new terms should respect the peculiarities and rules of the German language; • the pre-existing and fully-fledged terminology of the other German speaking legal systems should be considered, as they might offer terms that can be adopted to designate Italian legal concepts or serve as a point of reference for the creation of sensible neologisms.
In addition to these sometimes conflicting requirements, it was of great importance to preserve the historical South Tyrolean terminology in the German language, which partly derives from the Austro-Hungarian period or was generated spontaneously out of an immediate need (Palermo/Pföstl 1997: 17) and can by now be considered established (e.g.terms like Grundbuch, a type of land registry of Austrio-Hungarian origin, translated into Italian as libro fondiario).
The work of the Terminology Commission allows to: • determine 1-to-1 equivalences between terms in Italian and German, thus ensuring full terminological correspondence between the two language versions of legal and administrative texts; • reduce the number of coexisting variants and synonyms, especially in German, thus curtailing the possible sources of misunderstandings and diverging interpretations; • favour a clear, consistent and coherent communication, ensuring that both Italian and German native speakers may have access to legal texts.
The Terminology Commission needs qualified and professional input for their work.A group of terminologists composed of translators and legal experts at the Institute of Specialised Communication and Multilingualism of the European Academy of Bolzano elaborated the terminology entries which constitute the scientific basis for the Commissionʼs work by: • collecting relevant documentation and selecting the main concepts to be treated, together with the linguistic labels that are used to designate them (both in Italian and in South Tyrolean German); • describing the legal concepts selected (through definitions, contexts of use, usage notes, etc.); • conducting a contrastive analysis with the different German speaking legal systems; • if necessary, elaborating translation proposals.
The contrastive analysis entails a comparison of the Italian concepts with the German speaking legal systems of Austria, Germany and partly also Switzerland and the European Union.The terminologists look for equivalent concepts in those legal systems and try to identify the linguistic labels that are used to designate them. 5In case no full equivalent can be found, differences are clearly explained, be they minor conceptual distinctions or essential differences in use.Such cases are anything but rare: for example, the concept piano di studio in Italian university law and its German South Tyrolean equivalent Studienplan both refer to the list of courses that university students are to take in order to obtain a university degree in Italy.The use of Studienplan is well consolidated in South Tyrol (possibly because it is a literal translation of the Italian term), but if compared with the identical term used in the Austrian legal system, some problems surface.In fact, the linguistic label is the same, but the concepts behind them differ greatly.In Austria Studienplan designates a regulation that disciplines how a university course is organised.Hence, the Austrian term expresses a concept that in Italian university law would be called regolamento didattico del corso di studio (DISAI 2007: 931).As a result, the two sides of the Alpine border use the same term to designate two different concepts.This can cause misunderstandings and problems in the relations and agreements between the two countries and also one of the reasons why accurate comparative terminological work prior to standardisation is so important.
If no consolidated South Tyrolean translations or foreign equivalents exist, the terminologists formulate a translation proposal, thus creating neologisms.Translation proposals can be loan words, newly coined words, loan translations or paraphrases (cf.Sacco 1992: 40-41; de Groot 1999: 27 ff.).In the case of loan words the Italian legal term is taken over and used as such also in German.A simple example is the term Carabinieri, which is used to designate this military corps in German as in the Italian language.Newly coined words are specific renderings of Italian legal terms to be used in South Tyrol.For instance, the administrative law concept atti contestuali (different administrative acts produced at the same time) was labelled zusammen abgefasste Verwaltungsakte.This being a typical Italian administrative concept, no equivalent could be found in other legal systems and a specific translation was formulated by creating a previously inexistent term.Loan translations are terms created with German words to translate the elements of an Italian term quite literally, e.g.assistente sociale (social worker) = Sozialassistent, decreto ministeriale (Ministry decree) = Ministerialdekret.In some cases even the syntactic structure of the source language is mirrored (see 2.1.6).The last strategy used to create translation proposals is paraphrasing.If the other systems have no comparable legal concept and no adequate translation is available, the original concept may be explained with a paraphrase: atto conservativo (an administrative act that aims at safeguarding a right) = Rechtshandlung zu Zwecken der Wahrung oder Sicherung eines Rechts, corruzione propria (bribery to obtain an unlawful administrative action) = Bestechung zur pflichtwidrigen Vornahme einer Amtshandlung, etc. Terminological conciseness gives way to a high degree of transparency, so as to help the citizens understand the concept behind the term.Nevertheless, the strategy of paraphrasing should be limited, since long and complex terms will be hardly accepted.
All the material produced by the terminologists is checked by sub-commissions of subject field experts for correctness, appropriateness, established use and desired use.
The sub-commissions often review the definitions, select the preferred term among different competing translation proposals or revise and formulate themselves new translation proposals.Their task is to finalise the material to be submitted to the Terminology Commission.The work thus double-checked is then officially validated by the Terminology Commission (see 1.3).

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF STANDARDISATION CRITERIA 6
In the following sections we will analyse in detail which criteria the Commission has been adopting for their decisions (2.1) and illustrate the problems and critical aspects of the methodology applied (2.2).Some guiding criteria have been explicitly stated by the Commission while others have been deduced on the basis of their decisions.

Standardisation criteria
The Terminology Commission has followed a specific set of standardisation criteria during their work.A few were decided at the beginning, others as work progressed.Some criteria are inherently opposed (see 1.4) and the challenge is to find an adequate compromise for every single problematic term.

2.1.1
Adopt the terminology used in the neighbouring German speaking countries Wherever possible, the Commission strives to adopt the terminology already existing in one or more German speaking legal systems.Should there be several terms that designate the same concept, the Commission tends to adopt either the German or Austrian term.For example, the concept of anno comune (common year) in university law is an equivalent of the German gemeinsames Jahr.There is no problem in accepting the same term for South Tyrol.As a third option, the European terminology is considered, while the Swiss terminology, being often quite different from a legal and linguistic point of view, can only rarely serve as a point of reference.
Doubts may arise when the terminology of the foreign legal systems could be adopted, but clashes against terminology which is already established locally, be it correct or not.The Italian government office that issues driving licences and registers vehicles is called motorizzazione civile.Despite the South Tyrolean translation zivile Motorisierung being largely used within the community, the Commission decided to validate Kraftfahrzeugwesen as the official translation.In this case the motivation was the desire to substitute a rather ugly loan translation with a linguistic label that would be closer to the terminology used in Germany.

Select possibly transparent terms
The Commission aims at choosing possibly transparent terms, i.e. terms whose meaning is immediately clear.The term abigeato (cattle raiding) in penal law is quite difficult to understand even for an Italian native speaker.The equivalent German language compound validated by the Commission is Viehraub, whose elements Vieh (cattle) and Raub (robbery) immediately suggest the concept behind the term.

2.1.3
Be consistent with already validated terminology One of the Commissionʼs first concerns is to produce a uniform set of officially validated terminology.A high degree of conceptual and linguistic coherence with past decisions favours the dissemination and adoption of the proposed terminology by the end users, speeding up the process.For example, the official equivalent of delitto (a type of offence in penal law) being Verbrechen (in both the German and Austrian legal system), a series of hyponyms were constructed around the same term.The different types of delitto envisaged by Italian law have all been translated with a term that contains Verbrechen, e.g.delitto contro il matrimonio = Verbrechen gegen die Ehe, delitto contro il patrimonio = Verbrechen gegen das Vermögen, delitto di comune pericolo = gemeingefährliches Verbrechen, 7 etc.

2.1.4
Limit the use of Latinisms and other loan words This criterion stems from the general principles of transparency and simplicity of the standardised German translation equivalents.The Commission avoids validating Latin terms, even though these are frequent in the Italian legal language and almost as commonly used also in the German and Austrian legal systems.Latin expressions such as aberratio ictus, ius soli, mortis causa, petitum, etc. are well known by the German speaking lawyers.Nevertheless, the desire to help citizens understand the new terminology leads the Commissioners to translate or paraphrase most Latinisms used in the Italian legal system, e.g.aberratio ictus (transferred malice) = Fehlgehen hinsichtlich des Zielobjektes, petitum (object of a legal action in civil law) = Gegenstand des erhobenen Anspruchs, etc.The same principle is applied to all other foreign language terms.Up until now no English or other loan words from modern languages have been validated either.

Limit the number of acronyms and initialisms
This criterion also supports the creation of transparent translation proposals for a possibly large target group.For some bodies, taxes, roles etc., the acronym or initialism is widely used in Italian law, even more than the corresponding full forms.In German, the Commission has refused to create yet another short form and has validated only the complete translation, e.g. in administrative law ISTAT/Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (National Institute for Statistics) = Zentralinstitut für Statistik, in tax law ICI/imposta comunale sugli immobili (property tax on real estate levied at the municipal level) = Gemeindesteuer auf Liegenschaften, etc.

7
These types of delitti refer to offences against the obligations of marriage (such as bigamy, for example), against property (e.g.theft) and offences that potentially endanger or damage a large number of people that cannot be determined in advance.

2.1.6
Favour the syntactic structure noun + genitive attribute before the com pound noun A notable tendency of the Terminology Commission is their preference for the German translation equivalents that have the syntactic structure noun + genitive attribute instead of the corresponding compound form, even though the latter can be considered perfectly correct in German or is even the term that is commonly known in Germany and Austria.For the Italian term libertà di ricerca (freedom of research) the translation Freiheit der Forschung was preferred to Forschungsfreiheit.Also Aufnahme von Gesellschaftern (admission of new shareholders/partners) was chosen instead of Gesellschafteraufnahme as an equivalent of ammissione di soci.In both cases the compound terms are used in Austrian university law and German company law respectively.

Eliminate ambiguities inherent in Italian terminology
The Commission must take into consideration both the natural differences between Italian and German as well as the polysemous nature of some terms.For this reason they sometimes consider it necessary to distinguish the translations and add further specifications to the validated translation equivalents.These comments might refer to grammatical or semantic differences between the two languages.For example, in Italian law custodia (custody) can refer both to a person or an object.In the first sense it should be translated with Aufsicht, in the second with Verwahrung.The German translations validated by the Commission contain exactly those specifications in brackets: custodia = Aufsicht (auf eine Person bezogen), Verwahrung (auf eine Sache bezogen).

Consider frequency of use
The criterion of frequency of use is applied on the basis of experience, in order to choose between competing translations that are both correct from a legal and linguistic point of view.Validating the most frequently used alternative means respecting the more established term and thus speeding up the process of consolidation within the community of speakers (cf.Chiocchetti 2008: 26).

2.1.9
Consider authoritativeness of the source One out of two or more competing terms that are linguistically and legally correct may be cited in a more authoritative source.For example, terms that have been used in the official translation of the legal codices or that are commonly used by the relevant offices.Choosing the translation proposed by an authoritative source fosters its acceptance within the community.

Problems faced
The standardisation activity definitely faces serious challenges due to the difficulty of respecting more than one need: linguistic correctness and coherence on the one hand, legal precision and accuracy on the other hand and, as a third requirement, respecting already established usage.As these needs might diverge, the desire to avoid doubts and imprecisions at the legal level prevails, even at the cost of standardising linguistically inelegant or cumbersome terms.See for example the translation of atto conservativo with Rechtshandlung zu Zwecken der Wahrung oder Sicherung eines Rechts (see 1.4).
Notwithstanding the obvious difficulty of this sort of "juggling", some of the criteria that have up until now been adopted by the Terminology Commission could be revised with the aim of reducing the number of inconvenient or incoherent translation equivalents, especially the criteria concerning loan words and acronyms.Latinisms are an important part of the legal language in civil law systems, even of growing importance as a lingua franca between legal experts with different backgrounds (Benke/Meissel 2002: V-VI).As the Italian lawyer will use the expression efficacia ex nunc, so will the German talk of Wirksamkeit ex nunc when the legal effects of a specific event occur starting from the moment it has happened, but not in the past (Benke/Meissel 2002: 125).
The legal language is not closed to loan words from languages other than Latin either.For example, Italian company law uses the term "holding" as much as German law refers to the same concept with the compound Holdinggesellschaft (literally: "holding society").This is the reason why the Commission should probably revise the decision of not validating any loan words.The foreign term often reflects a well established usage and favours international exchanges.
In the same way, acronyms and initialisms serve linguistic efficiency and conciseness and may contribute to enhancing the readability of a text.It seems difficult to understand why the Commission should refuse to validate commonly used acronyms and initialisms, especially if we consider that the German speaking South Tyrolean community often ends up creating compounds which contain the Italian acronym and a German language specification.The German element actually expresses a concept that is already hidden behind a letter in the Italian acronym.For example, the compounds ICI-Gemeindesteuer and IRPEF-Steuer are commonly used for want of an equivalent German language acronym or initialism, where the German Steuer and the first Italian capital "i" for imposta express the same meaning (i.e.tax). 8The Commission should weigh the advantages and disadvantages in such cases before refusing to accept acronyms and initialisms.
Finally, one last problem consists in the belated constitution of the Commission with respect to the local situation (Palermo/Pföstl 1997: 37).In the 1970s and 1980s a local publisher printed a series called Blaue Reihe (Blue Series) consisting of the main Italian codices with their German parallel texts.Unfortunately, this work was not coordinated and supported by accurate and expert terminology work from the very beginning.The Commission was established only much later.As a consequence, not all the translation proposals made by the first translators of codices and drafters of local legislation can be considered correct (cf.Zanon 2008: 52).

2.2.1
The need for constantly updated standardised terminology Legal systems are not static; part of the legislation is constantly amended or revised, e.g. because the regulation of a specific subject field needs to be adapted to a new and different situation.For example, in university law, the term laurea, which indicates the Italian university degree conferred upon a student at the end of his/her course of study was initially translated with Laureatsgrad by the Commission.However, this was done in the framework of the old Italian higher education system that has undergone a deep reform since 1999 with the introduction of a two-step degree.Whereas the old system provided for courses of study with a duration of generally four years (or in some cases five or six), with the reform students now obtain a bachelorʼs degree after three years of study.Two further years are necessary to achieve a masterʼs degree.The linguistic label of each course of study had to be revised as explained in the following table: 9

Concept
Italian German 4/6-year degree according to the old higher education system laurea Laureat 9 3-year bachelorʼs degree, new system laurea or laurea triennale Laureat 5-year masterʼs degree, new system laurea magistrale or laurea specialistica Fachlaureat

CONCLUSIONS
Since the New Statute of Autonomy the German language legal terminology for South Tyrol has taken a huge step forward.Several translations of codices, important national laws and local legislation have been produced.However, creating a coherent, efficient and autonomous German legal language for South Tyrol is surely a long and daunting process that has not yet been completed.
South Tyrol has decided to face the problem with an official terminology standardisation effort.This has the advantage of providing coherent and precise high quality terminology, but also the negative effect of freezing the language in a certain moment of time, hindering its natural evolution, especially if updates are not taken care of timely nor widely disseminated.
Currently the quality of many texts produced by public authorities and private organisations can still not be considered fully adequate (cf.Zanon 2008: 52).Also, despite the official obligation to follow the Commissionʼs terminological decisions, there are neither regulations nor sanctions ensuring their implementation 10 (Palermo/Pföstl  1997: 23-32).The process of terminology standardisation followed by the Commission is quite complex; it aims at responding to the need for high quality terminology work 9 Previously Laureatsgrad, as explained above.
10 In fact it would be quite difficult to develop specific sanctions, given the difficulty of determining responsibilities for terminological mistakes or carelessness.Cf.Palermo/Pföstl (1997: 29-32) for a more in-depth analysis.
and at enabling public bodies to communicate with the population on the basis of full conceptual equivalence between languages (Palermo/Pföstl 1997: 21).In the end it represents an extremely important tool for the effective protection of a language minority.South Tyrol is a part of Northern Italy where a large German-speaking minority lives.In 1972 the local population was granted the right to use the minority language with the public administration, in court and in all realms of public life (DPR 672/1972).An urgent need for a clear and consistent German legal language that faithfully reflected the Italian legal system ensued.The task of responding to such "terminological emergency" was assigned to a commission of six legal experts and translators (DPR 574/1988), who were to officially validate (i.e.standardise) the German language equivalents to the existing legal and administrative Italian terms.The use of the newly standardised terminology is mandatory for all public bodies.