Current status and perspectives of terminology management in the legal departments of the Belgian public services

摘要

The Department of Applied Language Studies of Lessius Hogeschool has been invited by the translation department of the Ministry of Justice to design, develop and maintain a Terminology Management System ( TMS) of legal phraseology and terminology in the national languages (French, Dutch and German) . This paper firstly investigates how terminology management has been carried out in the translation departments of the federal public services of justice in Belgium. After a limited comparative survey on existing legal databases ( mainly Belgian, French and Canadian) , this paper proposes a Terminology Management System ( TMS) that is hoped to be more suitable to the purposes of legal translation and terminology in the three national languages in Belgium. It is expected that these perspectives will result into suitable legal terminology and translation services in other countries too.