Equivalence in terminology

This paper focuses on the criteria for a comparison of legal concepts between different legal backgrounds. The traditional concept of equivalence must be revised, since absolute equivalence is, between national legal systems each with its own ethical principles and political priorities, no longer possible. A comparison on the grounds of a definition by intension becomes difficult because of the indeterminacy of legal concepts which are bound to moral values of a given society in a certain period. The "tertium comparationis" for comparative terminography has to be found in the function of a concept within the framework of a specific legal solution, be it laws, court decisions, regulations or other legal provisions. We must develop a new comparative approach which does not aim at complete conceptual correspondence but at complete documentation of the national concepts. The ultimate goal of terminology work in law is to inform the user of the concepts used by national legal systems to control specific social circumstances. Equivalence in terminology.............................................................................................................1 Legal concepts ...............................................................................................................................3 a) Origin of legal concepts......................................................................................................3 b) Application of legal concepts..............................................................................................4 c) Indefiniteness of legal concepts .........................................................................................4 Basis for comparison......................................................................................................................5 a) Functional analysis.............................................................................................................5 b) Functional bridge................................................................................................................6 c) Methodology.......................................................................................................................7 Conclusion......................................................................................................................................9 Bibliography....................................................................................................................................9 Equivalence in terminology The preeminent goal of descriptive terminology is to describe relations between the concepts of a defined subject field and to identify the terms in two or more languages which designate one concept. [Cole 1993:400] There are relations between concepts within one language, described in conceptual systems, and of course, between two or more languages, resulting from the comparison of the corresponding conceptual systems. We will focus on the second relationship. In our first assumption we define equivalence, in line with Wüster, as a relation between concepts having the same characteristics (intensional identity). [Arntz/Picht 1989:159]