Legal Formulae in the National Legislations and in EU Directives on Consumer Contracts

This chapter deals with English neutral legal formulae and their Italian and French equivalents in the British, Italian and French national legislation on consumer contracts, and in the English, Italian and French versions of EU Directives also addressing consumer contracts. To do so, distinct ad hoc corpora are built. The chapter describes in detail the corpus building process and the ways the corpora are consulted to obtain equivalent terminology. The comparative analyses carried out bring to the fore discrepancies in the use and in the frequencies of the legal formulae across the different corpora. Occasionally, some formulae that were addressed in the previous chapter may not be retrieved from the corpora analysed in this chapter. Some possible explanations are given in this respect, and tentative conclusions are drawn. In addition, peculiarities regarding EU-driven corpora could emerge as a result of the language investigations. As a whole, this chapter provides instances of how corpus consultation can help retrieve full or near equivalents across the three languages in the particular domain focused on (i.e., national and EU legislation on consumer contracts).