The Bononia Legal Corpus - BoLC - is the result of an on-going research project. It is aimed at the construction and analysis of a multilingual comparable legal corpus. It is being developed at the University of Bologna. It has been coordinated by Rema Rossini Favretti and Fabio Tamburini. John Sinclair played a crucial role as consultant. We wish to thank Adriano Di Pietro for his contribution during the corpus design and implementation.

The representativeness of the corpus as a whole is based on two main aspects.

For the purposes of initial inquiry, reference was made to the legal language developed by the European Union and a pilot corpus was created consisting of parallel corpora in Italian and English.

Subsequently, comparable corpora were set up with representative documents of a legislative, judicial and administrative nature. The subcorpus consisting of Italian legal language and the subcorpus consisting of English legal language are taken to represent the two different legal systems, in particular the differences between the civil law and the common law systems.

In this dual perspective, it is intended to compare legal texts, representing on the one hand the common legal system of the European Union, and on the other, the various legal systems and cultures developed by nation States. It is aimed to take into account both the emergence of a standard legal system at European level and the plurality of national legal systems existing within the area of the European Union.

Further references to the project can be found in:

R. Rossini Favretti, F. Tamburini, E. Martelli, Words from Bononia Legal Corpus, in: Text Corpora and Multilingual Lexicography (W.Teubert ed.), John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 11-30.

R. Rossini Favretti, F. Tamburini, E. Martelli, Words from Bononia Legal Corpus, in: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Vol. 6 (Special Issue), 2001, 13-34.

R. Rossini Favretti, Equivalenze traduttive in corpora giuridici multilingue, in: Quaderni di Libri e Riviste d'Italia, ROMA, Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali-Divisione Editoria, 1999, pp. 47-66.

R. Rossini Favretti, Cross-language analysis and large multilingual corpora, in: Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata, XVII, 3, 1998, pp. 415-434.

R. Rossini Favretti, Using multilingual parallel corpora for the analysis of legal language: the Bononia Legal Corpus, in: Translation Equivalence. Proceedings of the Third European Seminar, (W .Teubert., E. Tognini Bonelli , N. Volz eds.), The TELRI Association -. V. , Institut für Deutsche Spräche, The Tuscan Word Centre, 1998, pp. 57-68.

R. Rossini Favretti, 'Estate' e 'tenure' come espressioni del concetto di proprietà feudale, in: Aspects of English and Italian Lexicology and Lexicography (D.Hart ed.), ROMA, LIS, 1992, pp. 244-253.

R. Rossini Favretti, Interpretazione e traduzione dei testi di legge, in: Atti della Fiera Internazionale della traduzione II, (a cura di M.A. Lorgnet), BOLOGNA, CLUEB, 1994, pp. 335-346.