Cover not available

Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

Measuring divergence in migration-related terminology between EU legal discourse and press articles in English and French

ORCiD logo with link | University of Birmingham
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Birmingham.

Published online: 9 February 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.25082.cla
Abstract
This paper sets out a bilingual (English and French) corpus-based approach to quantify divergence in terminology between legal discourse and news articles, triangulating a series of complementary indicators of frequency difference, predominant terms and absent terms. This methodology is then applied to purpose-built corpora consisting of EU legal discourse and newspaper articles on the subject of migration in English and French, illustrating the relevance of an approach to measuring shifts in terminological distance. The results of such a study can provide insights into the level of comprehensibility of legal discourse, which is fundamental to ensuring access to justice. This context makes it vitally important to develop such a methodology, which empirically measures whether the terminology used in EU legal discourse is continuing to diverge from language used in non-specialist settings.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Divergence of EU language varieties
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Building the corpora
    • 3.2Measure 1
    • 3.3Measure 2
    • 3.4Measure 3
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
References
Bajčić, M. (2011). Conceptualization of legal terms in different fields of law: The need for a transparent terminological approach. Research in Language, 9(1), 81–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Sketching Muslims: A corpus driven analysis of representations around the word ‘Muslim’ in the British Press 1998–2009. Applied Linguistics, 34(3), 255–278. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauder, H. (2014). Why we should use the term illegalized refugee or immigrant: A commentary. International Journal of Refugee Law, 26(3), 327–332. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bell, A. (1991). Language of the news media. Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berkeley, R., Khan, O., & Ambikaipaker, M. (2006). What’s new about new immigrants in twenty-first century Britain? Joseph Rowntree Foundation. [URL]
Biel, Ł. (2014). Lost in the Eurofog: The textual fit of translated law. Peter Lang. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2020). Eurolects and EU legal translation. In M. Ji, & S. Laviosa (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of translation and social practices (pp. 479–500). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biel, Ł., & Koźbiał, D. (2020). How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology. Estudios de Traducción, 101, 69–90. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blinder, S., & Allen, W. L. (2016). Constructing immigrants: Portrayals of migrant groups in British national newspapers, 2010–2012. International Migration Review, 50(1), 3–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brownlie, S. (2010). Representing news from France. In C. Schäffner & S. Bassnett (Eds.) Political discourse, media and translation (pp. 32–54). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clancy, B. (2010). Building a corpus to represent a variety of a language. In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 80–92). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clay, E. (2022). A corpus-based approach to examining terminological variation in EU law. International Journal of Language and Law, 111, 142–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Haas, H., Castles, S., & Miller, M. J. (2020). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world (6th ed.). Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Degano, C., & Sandrelli, A. (2020). A corpus-based study of ethically sensitive issues in EU directives, national transposition and the press. Lingue e Linguaggi, 341, 119–136. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dijkstra, L., Poelman, H., & Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2020). The geography of EU discontent. Regional Studies, 54(6), 737–753. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs. (2020). European migration network. [URL]
Doczekalska, A. (2009). Drafting and interpretation of EU law — paradoxes of EU multilingualism. In G. Grewendorf & M. Rathert (Eds.), Formal linguistics and law (pp. 339–370). De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dury, P. (2012). Le sentiment d’un besoin néologique chez l’expert pour remplacer un terme à connotation péjoratif. Quelques exemples tires du domaine medical. [The feeling of a neological need among experts to replace a term with a negative connotation. Some examples taken from the medical domain]. Neologica, 61, 81–94. [URL]
European Union. (2015). Joint practical guide of the European parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation. European Union. [URL]
. (2024). EUR-Lex — Access to European Union law. European Union. [URL]
Farkas, A. (2010). LF Aligner. [Computer programme] Available at: [URL]
Firmstone, J. (2018). United Kingdom. Media landscapes: Expert analyses of the state of the media. [URL]
Fischer, M. (2010). Language (policy), translation and terminology in the European Union. In M. Thelen & F. Steurs (Eds.), Terminology in everyday life (pp. 21–34). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Follesdal, A., & Hix, S. (2006). Why there is a democratic deficit in the EU: A response to Majone and Moravcsik. Journal of Common Market Studies, 44(3), 533–562. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2011). Legal language. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 3281–3289). Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffin, R. (1994). L’eurolecte: Oui, jargon communautaire: non. Meta: Journal des traducteurs, 39(4), 636–642. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Humbert-Droz, J. (2024). Term circulation and connotation. A corpus-based study of connotative meanings of terms through the lens of determinologisation. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication, 30(1), 11–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kenning, M.-M. (2010). What are parallel and comparable corpora and how can we use them? In A. O’Keeffe, & M. McCarthy (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 487–500). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2014). The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography, 11, 7–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koskinen, K. (2000). Institutional illusions: Translating in the EU Commission. The Translator, 6(1), 49–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kraus, P. (2008). A union of diversity: Language, identity and polity-building in Europe. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kurzon, D. (1997). ‘Legal language’: Varieties, genres, registers, discourses. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(2), 119–139. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lardeau, M. (2018). France. Media landscapes: Expert analyses of the state of the media. [URL]
Leal, A. (2021). English and translation in the European Union: Unity and multiplicity in the wake of Brexit. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leal, A., & Ó Riain, S. (2023). Language policy and the future of Europe : A conversation with Seán Ó Riain. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maley, Y. (1994). The language of the law. In J. Gibbons (Ed.) Language and the law (pp. 11–50). Longman. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McAuliffe, K. (2011). Hybrid texts and uniform law? The multilingual case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. International Journal of Semiotics of Law, 241, 97–115. [URL].
Mould, M. (2011). The Routledge dictionary of cultural references in modern French. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Paredes, P., Aguado Jiménez, P., & Sánchez Hernández, P. (2016). Constructing immigrants in UK legislation and Administration informative texts: A corpus-driven study (2007–2011). Discourse and Society, 28(1), 81–103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prieto Ramos, F. (2019). Implications of text categorisation for corpus-based legal translation research. The case of international institutional settings. In Ł. Biel, J. Engberg, M. Rosario Martín Ruano, & V. Sosoni (Eds.), Research methods in legal translation and interpreting. Crossing methodological boundaries (pp. 29–47). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prieto Ramos, F., & Morales Moreno, A. (2019). Terminological innovation and harmonization at international organizations: Can too many cooks spoil the broth? In I. Simonnaes & M. Kristiansen (Eds.) Legal translation: Current issues and challenges in research, methods and applications (pp. 87–112). Frank & Timme.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ramsay, A. (2000). Eurojargon: A dictionary of European Union acronyms, abbreviations and sobriquets (6th ed.). Fitzroy Dearborn.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robertson, C. (2014). EU legislative texts and translation. In L. Cheng, K. K. Sin, & A. Wagner (Eds.) The Ashgate handbook of legal translation (pp. 224–251). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sandrelli, A. (2018). Observing Eurolects: The case of English. In L. Mori (Ed.) Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law (pp. 63–92). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sirhan, N. R. (2021). Reporting Palestine-Israel in British newspapers. Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Somerville, W. (2007). Immigration under New Labour. Bristol University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Speelman, D., Grondelaers, S. & Geeraerts, D. (2003). Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers and the Humanities, 371, 317–337. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue