Legal translation and terminological resources. How to deal with stipulative correspondence

The notion of ‘equivalence’ is not new to translation studies and terminology but has been studied differently in these two disciplines, since translation equivalence and terminological equivalence do not coincide: while the former establishes a relationship between source-language (SL) and target-language (TL) units, segments or full texts, the latter assesses the relationship between terms and concepts embedded in conceptual systems. However, in the translation process, terminological resources are used to solve translation problems, so information on terminological equivalence is crucial for making the most appropriate choices in terms of translation equivalence. While playing a fundamental role in the building of bi- or multilingual terminological resources, equivalence has frequently failed to receive the visibility it deserves. In many resources, terms in two or more languages are presented as if they were characterized by full equivalence, even when this is not the case, while it would be better for the degree of equivalence to be specified. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the debate over the notion of equivalence in translation studies and in terminology, with special emphasis on legal terminology. The role of equivalence in legal terminological repositories is discussed in order to introduce “stipulative correspondence” (Magris 2018), a category that identifies the lexical relation between a term referring to a concept embedded in a specific legal system and a term used in a target language – which is not a language in which the legal system is generally expressed – to refer to the same concept. Stipulative correspondence is illustrated by examples extracted from an Italian-English parallel corpus of judgments delivered by the Italian Constitutional Court (Schiavi 2017-2018). It is argued that stipulative correspondence should be taken into account when designing (or restructuring) terminological resources and when describing information relevant to legal translation.