Language (policy), translation and terminology in the European Union

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of an EU language and translation policy and the peculiarities of translation and term-creation in an EU context. I first present the legal basis for a language and translation policy, focusing on national-level involvement in corpus planning, and, secondly, I analyse how institutional translation policy and practice affect the linguistic (language, text) and extra-linguistic (translator, receiver) aspects of translation. Thirdly, by revealing the complexity of conceptual systems at an EU-level and extending the model of Sager (1990), I analyse the stages of multilingual primary and secondary term-creation in an EU context. In the creation of secondary terms I draw a distinction between intra-conceptual and inter-conceptual term-transfer. I finally outline the linguistic and conceptual variability of EU terms.