Bridging Communication Gaps between Legal Experts in Multilingual Europe: Discussion of a Tool for Exploring Terminological and Legal Knowledge Resources

Abstract

In Europe, communication between legal experts is often hampered as a result of multilingual and cultural differences. For example, legal concepts either have different implementations in national laws or only exist in some regional legislations. Consequently, a one-to-one semantic equivalence between legal terminology in different languages is rare. To address these problems, and support and facilitate the communication between welfare professionals in a European context, we set up a small pilot project. Together with legal specialists in the area of senior care, and in line with the Termontography method, we developed a knowledge base covering trilingual terminology (English, French and Dutch), centred around the concepts 'CareHome', 'NursingHome' and 'ShortStay', in four different legal settings (UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands). In this paper, we discuss the functionalities and the underlying model of the data-mining tool 'KBExplorer', developed for browsing through the resulting terminological and legal information resource.