Abstract

This article presents lexical differences of legal German in Austria. The authoress discusses examples of terms used in German legal acts and compares them with the legal terminology in Germany. The article also described Austria’s efforts to retain linguistic autonomy within the European Union. Then, the results of an analysis of exemplary terms and their occurrence in the legal acts of Austria, Germany and in the context of the EU law have been analysed. The authoress also touched upon the usefulness of specialized dictionaries available in Poland as regards legal terminology differences in Germany and in Austria. She examined the occurrence of the analysed terms in Polish-German and German-Polish dictionaries in order to establish whether those publications take into account specificities of the legal language in Austria and whether they may be helpful to translators and lawyers.