Glossmen ⚡

Glossmen, lexical mediation, regulatory linguistics, institutional translation, semantic arbitration 1. Introduction Legal and regulatory documents are often described as “closed universes” of meaning, where every term is expected to carry a fixed, jurisdictional definition. However, in practice, terms such as “reasonable,” “material,” or “substantial equivalence” shift meaning across borders, agencies, and professional cultures. This phenomenon—known as semantic drift in regulated language —generates compliance risk, litigation, and delayed approvals.

The traditional solution has been to rely on bilingual legal dictionaries, harmonized glossaries (e.g., the EU’s IATE database), or ad hoc expert testimony. Yet each of these tools suffers from a common flaw: they treat meaning as static, pre-existing, and discoverable rather than negotiated.

(Full text of the three hypothetical regulatory pairs and the six low-glossability terms used in the experiment.)