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Gender-sensitive language in terminological definitions

A case study on Italian legal concepts

ORCiD logo with link | Eurac Research
ORCiD logo with link | Eurac Research
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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.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the authors.

Published online: 9 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00093.chi
Abstract
This paper examines the use of gender-sensitive language in terminology databases, focusing on terminological definitions. It is based on a case study on definitions of legal agentives in Italian, a grammatical gender language. The key question shaping many crucial choices is whether gender should be regarded as a characteristic of concepts or a property of objects. We discuss the challenges of (re)writing terminological definitions of legal concepts stored in a terminology database. These concern the conceptual, linguistic and comparative levels. With our study, we aim to contribute to the broader debate on language and gender. At the same time, we illustrate gender as a dimension of terminology that goes beyond terms and concerns the description and representation of concepts (e.g. in ontologies).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminology science and gender
    • 2.1Impact on terminology databases
    • 2.2Impact on terminological definitions
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Concept level
    • 5.2Language level
    • 5.3Comparative (conceptual) level
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
  • Legal References
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