Legal terminology acquisition as an integral part of intercultural communicative competence development

Abstract

The paper deals with an important aspect of intercultural communication for sustaining security – legal language and its acquisition methodologies. Studying and teaching several foreign languages for intercultural communication is conceived as a contribution to personal development and to interpersonal understanding, dialogue and co-operation, thus adding to the sustainability of the peaceful coexistence. The research presented tackles two issues simultaneously: detailed analysis of a set of most commonly used criminal law terms in English and their equivalents in Norwegian, as they are used in two different legal systems within different legal culture, and contrastive analysis methodologies for legal terminology which may effectively facilitate learners’ acquisition of legal terms in several foreign languages for effective intercultural communication. Contrastive analysis of English and Norwegian criminal law terms is presented in the paper as an example of the suggested methodology. It illustrates the procedure of the analysis, its stages, results and benefits for terminology learners.