Abstract: In each member state of the EU, the legal language differs substantially from that of the “acquis communautaire”. There are strategic as well as practical reasons for the gap between the language actually used and the traditional approach advocated by Wüster’s General Theory of Terminology (GTT). These reasons are illustrated in this paper through a contrastive analysis of some linguistic units –vague or ambiguous terms, hypernyms, hyponyms, quasi synonyms, general terms and calques– in French and Spanish.
