Measuring divergence in migration-related terminology between EU legal discourse and press articles in English and French

Abstract This paper sets out a bilingual (English and French) corpus-based approach to quantify divergence in terminology between legal discourse and news articles, triangulating a series of complementary indicators of frequency difference, predominant terms and absent terms. This methodology is then applied to purpose-built corpora consisting of EU legal discourse and newspaper articles on the subject of migration in English and French, illustrating the relevance of an approach to measuring shifts in terminological distance. The results of such a study can provide insights into the level of comprehensibility of legal discourse, which is fundamental to ensuring access to justice. This context makes it vitally important to develop such a methodology, which empirically measures whether the terminology used in EU legal discourse is continuing to diverge from language used in non-specialist settings.