Making Drafting Clearer and More Accessible in a Multilingual Context: The Role of Contrastive Terminology and Comparative Law

The language and terminology used in the laws make a difference. Proper management of lawmaking and quality assurance or verification mechanisms, especially in the field of language used in legal drafting, could increase the quality of legislation. Observing the principles of efficiency, economy, unambiguity, and intelligibility, among others, could improve compliance, serve legal certainty, and facilitate less problematic implementation practices. As law works through language, and neither law nor language is a static phenomenon but prone to changes, complying with these principles has always been challenging. This challenge is most evident in constitutional systems constitutionally mandated to multilingualism. Multilingualism requires the collaboration of many actors in drafting, adopting, publishing, and consolidating the laws in more than one language in the context of each language having its origin state in which legal terminology and dogmatics might differ. There are already some practical implementations of the abovementioned theoretical demands, for instance, in Italy, Switzerland, and the European Union (EU). For this chapter, we have chosen to showcase the Swiss and EU experiences, focusing on the most salient Hungarian examples of translation clashes and two case studies on using terminology databases in the drafting processes of a multilingual context. We compare the Swiss TERMDAT and the EU’s IATE databases and the challenges they have faced and highlight the potential commonalities in addressing them. Based on these and other examples and lessons learned, we argue that the drafting process in multilingual jurisdictions could benefit from contrastive terminology, comparative law, and terminology databases created on these bases. We can even conclude that the Swiss TERMDAT could serve as a best practice for those working with language and law, even for the IATE, and that this latter could be viewed as a shared supranational polycentric institution, producing norms according to the institutional interaction between the national and European level in 24 different languages.