Formation and normalization of legal terminology in the field of digital technologies

Based on the latest legal texts, the article examines the process of forming the terminologyof legal acts used in the digital technology field. The empirical base of the study consists of two blocks of legal texts: acts of strategic planning (strategies, national programs, passports of federal projects, etc.) and regulatory legal acts (federal laws and their projects) published in the period from 2016 to 2019. The peculiarities of lexical representation of the first group of documents (unsystematic use of terms, the use of metaphors and many words in quotation marks, excessive definitions and explanations, erosion of terminological apparatus of jurisprudence) indicate, in the author’s opinion, two main features of the language of programmatic and strategic documents related to the field of digital technologies: 1) the declarative nature of the text, a large number of journalistic expressions have an emotional rather than rational effect; 2) there is no established scientific terminology and professional language which one can use in order to speak about digital legal relations. The second group of texts is now small in number but allows us to conclude that a much more careful approach to the terminological apparatus is taken. In general, the process of forming a legal terminological system in the field of digital technologies goes through several stages: the formation of the terminology of information technology field (largely due to borrowings from the English language); the inclusion of term-like units in the language of programmatic and strategic documents; development of legal terms proper, enshrined in the texts of regulatory legal acts.