Occupational safety and health: English and Russian legislative acts’ definitions

Theoretically any legislative act is to be based on a system of requirements that correlate not only within one document but do not contradict all the other existent documents either. In view of this one single meaning of the terminological units connected with a particular domain comes as a logical consequence. Nevertheless in fact legislative terminology does not correlate and represents certain asymmetry while the expressed requirements provoke various interpretations. The paper aims at challenging the given contradiction between the necessity of a single terminological system concerning the occupational safety and health sphere and the lack of such a system. Providing this the paper analyzes the definitions of the International Labor Organization’s tools and Russian legislative acts on occupational safety and health. The authors give examples of terms lexical-semantic correspondence paying attention to the variants of language units translated from English into Russian.