Antonella Nardella´s thesis is the result of a terminology project based on the cooperation between the Terminology Coordination Unit (TermCoord) and the Laboratory for Terminology of the Department of Interpreting and Translation (University of Bologna, Forlì Campus). The aim of this work is to feed IATE with Italian and German terms related to the domain “asylum law”.
Within the project, I had the opportunity to spend one month at TermCoord on a study visit. A tutor supported me with the thesis-related work and I gained a valuable insight into the work of terminologists at TermCoord.
For the practical part of the thesis I manually created two corpora, one in Italian and one in German. The corpora contain official and reliable sources including the main International, European, (Federal) German and Italian immigration and asylum legislation. With the corpus analysis software AntConc 142 terms were extracted. These terms were initially analyzed in the Excel-file used by TermCoord to add entries to IATE. These files contain the main fields of a terminology entry: “Definition”, “Context”, “References” and “Notes”. The Excel files were subsequently converted to SDL MultiTerm entries with SDL MultiTerm Convert. Further fields were added before creating the new Termbase: “Hyponym”, “Hypernym”, “Cohyponym”, “Related terms” and a multimedia field where the concept maps can be uploaded. The creation of 6 concept maps was the last step of the practical part. I created two general concept maps both having the same structure, one in Italian and one in German, containing all the extracted terms. Moreover, I created 4 concept maps concerning expulsions, to illustrate the differences between the Italian and German legal system.
The theoretical section of the thesis focuses on the challenging aspects of multilingual legal terminology and on the best practices. One chapter deals with asylum law, listing the main features of the most relevant International, European, Italian and German legislation.
The thesis could be of interest to different groups of people: legal translators, legal experts, administrative officials, students and all those people who want to know more about German and Italian asylum terminology.
The complete paper can be read here: Immigrazione e diritto d’asilo: Un confronto terminologico tra Italia e Germania
Antonella Nardella
Antonella recently earned her master’s degree in Interpreting at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna (Forlì Campus). She was born and raised in a multicultural environment in Frankfurt. In the last few years she traveled and studied all over Europe: from Italy, Germany and Austria to Luxembourg and the UK. Her professional interests range from conference interpreting and technical translation to terminology and new technologies. Her professional aim is to deepen her knowledge in these fields and to combine them. Moreover, she wants to get further specialized in some areas of expertise such as migration and asylum law, which were at the core of her M.A. thesis. She is passionate about traveling and learning languages.