FREQUENCY AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF LEGAL TERMINOLOGY IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS: A CORPUS-BASED AND LEXICOGRAPHIC STUDY
Keywords:
legal terminology, corpus linguistics, international law, lexicography, legal translation, frequency analysis, UNCAC, ILO Convention, UNESCO ConventionAbstract
Legal terminology is a fundamental component of international legal discourse, providing conceptual stability, interpretative consistency, and communicative precision across multilingual legal systems. In contemporary international law, where legal instruments regulate increasingly complex and interdisciplinary domains, the need for systematic analysis of legal terminology has become crucial for both legal scholarship and translation practice.
This study examines the frequency distribution, conceptual structure, and lexicographic representation of forty legal terms extracted from three major international conventions: the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), the International Labour Organization Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The corpus contains 1,247 occurrences of selected legal terms.
A mixed-method corpus-based approach is employed, integrating quantitative frequency analysis with qualitative lexicographic comparison. The study uses authoritative legal reference sources, including Black’s Law Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary of Law, UNTERM, and IATE, to evaluate conceptual stability and variation
