Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the difficulty associated with the translation of legal terminology and phraseology, as well as with terminology of other domains, in the LETRINT 1+ corpus, including nine representative genres of three institutional settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). For comparative purposes, four levels of translation difficulty were assigned to multiple terminological features by a group of specialized translators through a consensus-building process of annotation based on the cognitive effort estimated for translation decision-making. The difficulty scores obtained confirm the correlation between legal singularity and higher translation difficulty, as well as the connection of more commonly used legal terms and phrasemes, and core economic terms, with lower difficulty levels. The findings also provide evidence of the prominence of non-legal specialized terminology in institutional legal discourses, and the aggregate terminological difficulty levels of each genre examined, which can be particularly useful for informing translation quality assurance, project management and translator training.

Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers multiple genres, as in the case of texts translated in institutional settings. This paper describes the multilayered sequential approach to corpus building applied in a comparative study on legal translation in three of these settings. The approach is based on a full mapping and categorization of institutional texts from a legal perspective; it applies an innovative combination of stratified sampling techniques integrating quantitative and qualitative criteria adapted to the research aims. The resulting corpora, categorization matrix and selection records, together with the methodological detail provided, can be useful for building other multi-genre corpora in translation studies and further afield.

The analysis of domain-specific terminology is essential for characterizing specialized discourses, and emerges as a useful means of measuring the thematic hybridity of law and legal translation in particular. This paper accordingly presents a large-scale mapping of terminological and phraseological features in a multi-genre corpus that was built as part of the LETRINT project on institutional legal translation. The corpus-driven analysis focuses on the density of legal terminology and phraseology, on the one hand, and that of terminology of other specialized domains, on the other, in nine genres that are considered representative of three central legal functions (law-making, compliance monitoring and adjudication) in three international settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). The comparative examination of density scores provides empirical evidence of the common core features of the selected genres, and reveals variations based on institutional thematic focus, primary legal function and genre specificities. These insights nuance our understanding of international legal discourses and domain specialization in institutional translation.