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<Paper uid="P06-1118">
  <Title>Francis.Brunet-Manquat@imag.fr</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="937" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> One of the most time-consuming hindrances to supranational law drafting and convention negotiation is the lack of understanding among negotiators and technical writers. This is not only due to the fact that different languages are involved, but mainly to the inherent differences in the legal systems. Countries that speak the same language (like France and part of Switzerland) may use the same word to represent different legal concepts3,  the Landeshauptmann is the president of the provincial council, with much more limited competence that the Austrian Landeshauptmann, who is head of one of the states (Bundesland) that are part of the Austrian federation. as defined in their respective legal traditions. The same concept may be referred to in different ways according to the legal system4. Also, terms that may superficially seem to be translations of each other can represent different legal notions5.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In order to concretely address these problems, several institutions representing translators, terminologists, legal experts and computational linguists joined in the LexALP project, co-funded by EU's INTERREG IIIb Alpine Space programme.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The objective of the project is to compare the specialised terminology of six different national legal systems (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Slovenia) and three supranational systems (EU law, international law and the particular framework of the Alpine Convention) in the four official languages of the Al-pine Convention, which is an international framework agreement signed by all countries of the Alpine arc and the EU. This contrastive analysis serves as a basis for the work of a group of experts (the Harmonising Group) who will determine translation equivalents in French, Italian, German and Slovene (one-toone correspondence) in the fields of spatial planning and sustainable development for use within the Convention, thus optimising the understanding between the Alpine states at supranational level.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The tools that are to be developed for these objectives comprise a corpus bank and a term bank.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The corpus bank is developed by adapting the bistro system (Streiter et al., 2006; Streiter et al., 2004). The term bank is based on the Jibiki plat- null held whenever an elected deputy or senator either resigns or dies. In Germany in such cases the first non-elected candidate is called to parliament. Ersatzwahlen are a rare phenomenon, foreseen in some very specific cases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  form (Mangeot et al., 2003; S'erasset, 2004).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> This paper details the way the Jibiki platform is used in order to cope with a new dictionary structure. The platform provides dictionary access and edition services without any new and specific development. null After a brief overview of the Jibiki platform, we describethechoicesmadebytheLexALPteamfor the structure and organisation of their term bank.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Then, we show how this structure is described using Jibiki metadata description languages. Finally, we give some details on the resulting LexALP Information System.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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