Legal Formulae in Terms of Service

This chapter is dedicated to an in-depth analysis of the English neutral formulae and their Italian and French equivalents in online terms of service (ToS). To this aim, corpora of terms of web hosting services are consulted. English and Italian ToS corpora are sourced from the literature (Giampieri, 2024). The French corpus is created anew for the purposes of this chapter. The chapter summarises the corpus building process of the English and Italian ToS corpora, and explains in detail the creation of the French ToS corpus. It also discusses the consultation of the English, Italian and French ToS corpora to retrieve and compare equivalent legal formulae across the three languages. The chapter findings underscore that it is possible to source full equivalents of the English neutral formulae by consulting the Italian and French ToS corpora. Some equivalents are sourced almost effortlessly, whereas others need more analytical searches, which are described thoroughly in the chapter. The methodologies followed are fully replicable for scientific research and academic purposes.