Abstract:

Legal terminology is one of the most popular topics of modern linguistic research. Interest in legal terms is not accidental: they contribute to the precise formulation of legal regulations and help to achieve maximum conciseness of the legal text. This paper describes the issue of legal terminology and introduces the comparative analysis of various legal systems and the linguistic analysis of the texts of legal documents with a view to distinguishing several groups of legal terms. They, subsequently, help international students to narrow the selection of an equivalent unit of a legal term.

Having carried out research on the material of more than 3000 pages of legal texts, the authors identify a number of difficulties that non-law students face when choosing the equivalent legal term in English and Russian.

The results of the study and the glossary developed by the authors are actively used during the teaching of translation at the Faculty of Philology at Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University, Moscow, Russia) and implemented into the Institute of Continuing Education and Staff Retraining (RUDN University, Moscow, Russia).

Keywords:

Legal terminology, national legal terms, international legal terms, legal concepts, legal systems.