Developing targeted legal terminology resources: Learning from future lawyers

A team of linguists and legal scholars of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste is working on TERMitLEX, a new terminological knowledge base (TKB) dealing exclusively with legal matters. TERMitLEX is based on the terminological record template developed for TERMit (Magris 2001, 2002), the first terminology database of the University of Trieste. Given that (prospective) lawyers represent a new group of end users besides translators and interpreters, their specific needs were taken into account in the design of this new TKB. To identify the future lawyers’ needs, a questionnaire was administered to final-year students of the Department’s own 5-year degree programme in Law. The questionnaire revealed that the students have a scarce knowledge of both traditional and online lexicographical and terminological resources and therefore either do not use them efficiently or do not use them at all. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the future lawyers’ needs and preferences and to illustrate what impact these needs and preferences can have on the structure of a TKB.