TerKom project (Joint Commission for Terminology)

The historical and legal basis of the project lies in the Autonomy Statute of the region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol approved in 1972. Article 99 of the Statute confers the German language the same status as the Italian language in the province of Bolzano/Bozen. More in general, article 2 grants equal rights to all citizens, no matter what their native language is. Article 100 of the Statute further estabilishes the right of all citizens of the province to use their native language when dealing with the public administration and during judicial procedures.

16 years after the Statute was approved, a decree implementing the equal status of both languages was passed. On 15th July 1988 the decree of the President of the Republic no. 574 set the rules for the use of the German and Ladin languages by the public administration and during legal actions. The decree contains a series of dispositions for the daily use of the German language by the citizens dealing with public institutions. All institutions affected by the decree are listed; basically, only the private sector is excluded. Today, the German native speakers have the right to use their language during all contacts with public institutions.

Hence derives the need for a clear and unambiguous German language terminology that responds to the needs of public administrations writing legal and administrative documents in both Italian and/or German and which must be able communicate with the citizens in a clear and comprehensible way in either language.

The decree foresees the creation of a Joint Commission for Terminology, whose role it is to determine, update and validate the legal, administrative and technical terminology used by the above-mentioned bodies as well as to draft and maintain a dictionary of legal, administrative and technical terminology in Italian and German. (DPR 574/88, art. 6, s. 1)

Since its establishment in 1994, the Institute of Specialised Communication and Multilingualism of the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen collaborates with the Terminology Commission.

The collaboration became even more intense after a convention was signed in June 2000 between the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen and the European Academy. According to the convention, The European Academy elaborated 13,000 concepts of the different branches of the Italian legal system in Italian and German.

The project described in the convention, called TerKom project, is subdivided into different work phases, some of which are required by the legislation regulating the activity of the Terminology Commission (phases 3-5):

1. Terminologists and legal experts elaborate terminology entries on the basis of contrastive work between different legal systems. Starting from the Italian legal system, different German-language systems are compared with it (Austria, Germany, Switzerland). The terminology already in use in South Tyrol is also taken into consideration. Whenever it is not possible to identify an equivalent to the Italian term in the other legal systems, a translation proposal is suggested.
2. Sub-commissions of experts, one for each legal subject field, revise and evaluate each terminology entry before it is standardised by the Terminology Commission.
3. The Joint Commission for Terminology accepts or modifies the translation equivalents proposed by the sub-commissions.
4. The decisions of the Commission are sent to the commissioner of the Italian government and to the provincial government, which can propose changes and/or integrations within a time span of six months.
5. Finally, the translation equivalents are published on the official journal of the region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol.

All the results of this terminology work are made freely available in bistro, the Information System for legal terminology.