The EU plays an important role in legal harmonization. In this study we analyze if legal harmonization also entails terminological harmonization, as terminological consistency is essential in international organizations. A diachronic analysis was carried out of environmental law principles and their term variants in English and Spanish in the EUR-Lex2/2016 corpus. The results show a high degree of term variation in both languages and only a slight tendency towards harmonization where the use of certain variants increases over time and the number of different variants for the same principle decreases. The complexity of the multiword terms studied is probably one of the causes for the astonishing number of variants found, but we believe that more effort and resources should be allocated to term management.
Over the years, Environmental Law has developed thanks to initiatives at the national, regional and
international levels. Principles, such as the precautionary principle, prevention principle, and
polluter pays principle, are now fully integrated into environmental law at an international, regional
and, often, national level. Some of these principles originated at the national level, and have
permeated into regional and international law. In contrast, others, which were initially implemented
at a regional or international level, have later on been adopted by national lawmakers [
From the 1970s onwards, the EU has played an important role in the harmonization of national
environmental laws. The harmonization of law can be defined as ensuring concordance of various
legal orders through the elimination of divergent elements and overcoming differences so that these
orders function in accordance with the aims and interests of the engaged entities [
In the present study, we assume that legal harmonization will (and should) in time also lead to
terminological harmonization. As all EU regulations and directives are made available in all the
official languages of the EU, terminological harmonization should occur in the translation process as
well. Legal terms, the main “prompts and points of access to knowledge structures of the domain”
[
To study terminological harmonization in environmental law, we carried out a diachronic
analysis of the terms used for the principles of environmental law in the EUR-Lex2/2016 corpus
(EUR-Lex) [
arianne@ugr.es (A. Reimerink); pleon@ugr.es (P. León-Araúz) 0000-0002-7264-4580 (A. Reimerink); 0000-0002-8520-2749 (P. León-Araúz);
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different facets or dimensions [
The English-Spanish parallel subcorpora of the EUR-Lex2/2016 corpus were used to study terminological harmonization of environmental law principles. The corpus is subdivided diachronically into decades, thus providing the means to analyze changes over time. We analyzed how the most salient environmental law principles are conveyed in English (50s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s) and Spanish (80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s; data for Spanish are available from 1986 onwards).
Firstly, to make sure that the corpus we analyzed was related to environmental law (the topic of this study), we used the option EUROVOC classification in Text types of the function Concordance. EUROVOC is the EU's multilingual and multidisciplinary thesaurus, which contains keywords organized in 21 domains and 127 sub-domains. In this case, we restricted the texts in the corpus to “all values containing environment”. In a first run, we analyzed the complete English subcorpus to select the environmental law principles, whose diachronical evolution we would study afterwards, with the following CQL:
CQL1: [tag="N.*|JJ.*|RB.*|VVN.*|VVG.*"]{1,}[lemma="principle"][tag!="N.*|JJ.*"] within <s/> It searches, within a sentence (within <s/>), for the lemma principle ([lemma="principle"]) preceded by nouns, adjectives, adverbs, past participles, or present participles ([tag="N.*|JJ.*|RB.*|VVN.*|VVG.*"]) appearing one or more times ({1,}) and followed by anything except for a noun or adjective. This prevents from extracting sentences where principle is not the head of the term but a modifier. The search provided 4722 results, which were manually analyzed to extract MWTs such as precautionary principle, prevention principle, and polluter pays principle, as well as several of their variants.
After selecting the environmental principles and variants, these were searched in the subcorpora divided by decade and with the same EUROVOC classification restriction. At this point, two additional CQL searches where carried out to find further variants:
CQL2: [lemma="principle"][]{0,5}[lemma="polluter|pay|prevention|preventive|sustain|precaution|preca utionary|rectification|rectify|remedy|source"] within <s/> CQL3: [lemma="polluter|pay|prevention|preventive|sustain|precaution|precautionary|rectification|rectif y|remedy|source"][]{0,5}[lemma="principle"] within <s/>
CQL2 and CQL3 search for possible variants by using the MWT head “principle” and the modifiers found in the previous search (for example polluter, prevention, source, etc.) with a 5-element span in between. This way, variants such as “principle that the polluter should pay” could be extracted.
Finally, the Parallel Concordance function of Sketch Engine was used to analyze term variation in the Spanish version of the English concordances. This provided information on whether certain English variants show a preferred Spanish variant, and if those preferences also change over time and become more harmonized.
In the first run, where we analyzed the complete corpus, CQL1 retrieved 4722 concordances. As the CQL sequence may cause several hits for each concordance2, after hiding sub-hits in the advanced Filter function, 3950 unique results were retrieved. These were analyzed manually to get a feel for the terms and variants related to the environmental law principles and the language surrounding them in the corpus. Concordances such as the following were useful for our analysis: 1. The 7th EAP should therefore be based on the fundamental principles of environmental law – the polluter pays principle, the precautionary principle, the preventive principle and the rectification at source principle – … 2. … improved implementation of key environmental principles (polluter pays, prevention and precaution) and of existing EC environmental laws … 3. The Contracting Parties undertake to develop the transport sector while observing the precautionary principle, the preventive principle and the polluter-pays principle. 4. In addition, this regulation is consistent with the Union's environmental legislation and policy and its main tenets such as pollution prevention, control and the polluter pays and precautionary principles.
In 1 and 2 the keywords in context (KWIC) were “fundamental principles” and “environmental principles” respectively, whereas in 3 it was “precautionary principle” and in 4 “precautionary principles”.
Other results were not taken into account as they were not related to environmental principles, as shown in the following examples: 5. … the basic principles for integrated protection and use of groundwaters and surface waters within such a river basin management approach … 6. … budgetary principles of the Member States, such as unity and universality, should be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions … 7. … should be guided by these climate policy principles and by the principles of sustainability, social responsibility and equity between the generations and people … Although example 5 refers to basic principles related to protection, the context clarifies that these principles are more related to the scientific and technical principles that can be applied and not the legal principles. Example 6 refers to another subfield (budget) as well and 7 distinguishes between climate policy principles and other, thus not related, principles.
This first run also gave a first insight into the high level of term variation of some of the principles involved. For example, for the polluter pays principle the following were found: polluter pays principle, polluter-pays principle, “polluter pays” principle, ‘Polluter Pays’ principle, “polluter pays principle”, principle that the polluter should pay, etc.
After this first run, the following principles stood out for further analysis: the polluter pays principle, the precautionary principle, the prevention principle, the subsidiarity principle, the sustainability principle, and the rectification at source principle (not the preferred variant as we will see later on).
For the second run, we analyzed the selected principles in the subcorpora restricted according to decade with the additional restriction of “all values containing environment” in the EUROVOC 2 Queries in Sketch Engine are both lazy and greedy. option of Text Types. Again sub-hits were omitted. No results were obtained for the 1950s and 1970s, which were thus excluded from further analysis, and only very few for the 1980s. The subsidiarity principle and sustainability principle were also excluded for lack of results, 10 and 8 hits respectively over all decades in total. Variants for each principle were extracted and counted manually.
Two limitations must be taken into account: 1) the number of tokens in each subcorpus is different; and 2) the 2010s only include texts up to 2016. Therefore, the results and our conclusions must be taken with caution and will mostly refer to tendencies that stand out according to the data we have.
For the polluter pays principle (Figure 1), the variants ‘polluter pays’ principle and polluter pays principle stand out in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. The variant principle that the polluter should pay is quite common and stays stable over time. However, the “polluter pays” principle is the second most preferred variant in the 2000s (122 hits) but appears much less often in the 2010s (9). There seems to be a tendency of terminological harmonization from the 2000s to the 2010s as quite a few variants disappear (20), although a few new ones come up (4). Taking into account that the 2010s has fewer tokens and only includes texts up to 2016, no definitive conclusions can be drawn.
The precautionary principle (Figure 2) also has a clear preferred variant: precautionary principle. In this case, terminological harmonization seems to be clearer, as the number of variants drops from 8 in the 1990s and 6 in the 2000s to 3 in the 2010s.
The diachronic development of the prevention principle seems more chaotic according to our data (Figure 3). In the 1990s, three variants stand out: principle that preventive action should be taken (16), principle of prevention (14), and principle of preventive action (13). In the 2010s, however, the preferred variants are principle that preventive action should be taken (35), principle of prevention (22), preventive principle (19), and prevention principle (15). Then in the 2010s, only the principle that preventive action should be taken (13) perseveres, which may be the result of terminological harmonization, but may also be caused by the smaller size of the corpus and the lower number of results (26 in total).
The results show that the term formation process has only just started for this principle, and the same can be said for the rectification at source principle (Figure 4), as the preferred variant in all decades is principle that environmental damage should […] be rectified at source. However, in the 2010s a new variant emerges, which seems slightly more lexicalized: principle of rectification of pollution at source.
The results show that there is a certain tendency towards terminological harmonization in the case of environmental law principles in English in the EUR-Lex2/2016 corpus, although the proliferation of term variants in all cases is quite astonishing. In addition, although there has been an effort for legal harmonization of environmental law in the EU, the term formation process of some of the principles is at its very beginning, even in English.
To study the diachronic evolution of Spanish variants and their possible terminological harmonization over time, we started out analyzing three common variants of the polluter pays principle in English, polluter pays principle, ‘polluter pays’ principle, and “polluter pays” principle, with the View translations in Parallel Concordance function. To do this, we used a simplified version of CQL 3: [lemma="polluter"][]{0,5}[lemma="principle"] [tag!="N.*|JJ.*"] within <s/>
Sub-hits were again filtered out. Our analysis showed no correlation between specific English variants and their counterparts in the Spanish segments. For example, the English variants “polluter pays” principle and polluter pays principle both showed the same Spanish variants: principio de “quien contamina paga”, principio de que quien contamina paga, principio de quien contamina paga, principio “quien contamina paga”, principio de “quien contamina, paga”, principio de que “quien contamina, paga”, principio de quien contamina, paga, etc. The fact that the first English variant has quotation marks and the second does not, in no way predicts the use of quotation or other punctuation marks in the Spanish texts. There was also no clear preference for one equivalent for each English variant.
Therefore, we decided to accumulate the data and analyze term evolution of the Spanish variants separately. Figure 5 shows that the preferred Spanish variants for the polluter pays principle are principio “quien contamina, paga”, principio de “quien contamina, paga”, principio de que “quien contamina, paga”, and principio de que quien contamina, paga in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. A slight tendency towards terminological harmonization can be seen as there seems to be a preference for three variants in the 2010s (principio “quien contamina paga”, principio de “quien contamina paga”, and principio de que quien contamina, paga) as compared to five in the 2000s. The number of different variants grows from the 1990s (18) to the 2000s (23) and then decreases in the 2010s (14), which is also a sign of harmonization. However, the number of variants is again surprising.
One reason for the proliferation of Spanish variants in the case of the polluter pays principle may be that it includes a verbal form. In Spanish, this leads to many possible grammatical structures. Therefore, the harmonization process may take more time.
In this study, we analyzed the diachronic evolution of term variants of environmental law principles
in English and Spanish in the EUR-Lex2/2016 corpus. We assumed that legal harmonization would
in time also lead to terminological harmonization. The results show that term variation is ubiquitous
in the English as well as in the Spanish texts. Several reasons may explain this phenomenon. Firstly,
it may be that not enough time has passed for harmonization to occur. The lack of lexicalization of
the prevention principle and the rectification principle in English are certainly an indication in that
sense. The fact that they are multiword terms, and in some cases even include verbs among their
elements (for example the polluter pays principle), gives rise to term variation in Spanish as well
[
As ensuring terminological consistency is essential in international organizations for the sake of
legal univocity and certainty, and thus for quality assurance [
For future research, we will carry out a detailed contrastive analysis of punctuation usage
between English and Spanish to try to find an explanation of punctuation usage in our data. We will
also relate our results with existing systematic classifications of term variation, such as the one
proposed by [
The author(s) have not employed any Generative AI tools.