The present study considers terminological variation from a bilingual perspective by
analysing a parallel corpus made of EU texts in English and Italian concerning the criminal
law subfield of crime victims. After providing a brief chronological overview of different
terminological schools of thought questioning the univocity principle postulated
by the traditional theory of terminology, the paper introduces denominative variation,
i.e. the linguistic phenomenon in which different denominations are used to refer to the
same concept (Freixa 2006). The aim of the paper is to present a case study on a specific
form of denominative variation, i.e. horizontal denominative variation, which consists
of the coexistence of more than one designation for the same concept in a set of texts
which are to be considered homogeneous as regards their degree of specialization, and to
propose a tentative classification of the horizontal denominative variants extracted from
the corpus.
