The Dubious Quality of Legal Dictionaries

As a consequence of the still increasing transnational commercial and scholarly cooperation and exchange, more and more often legal information has to be translated. Sometimes the content of legal documents (contracts, statutory provisions, books and articles on legal topics and so on) has to be translated into another language. But even more frequently, information on rules from one legal system has to be provided in the legal language of another legal system. In both cases the translator or the lawyer involved is confronted with difficulties of legal translation. In both cases bilingual legal dictionaries could play an important role in the translating process by providing translation suggestions and information on the linguistic context of terms in the target language, such as specific noun-verb combinations, or typical collocations. It is, therefore, not really surprising that publishing houses are offering numerous bilingual legal dictionaries to translators and lawyers. To translate between the different languages of the Member States of the European Union (EU) about one hundred seventy bilingual legal dictionaries are available. Regrettably, the quality of most of these dictionaries is poor to extremely bad. Only a few dictionaries are of good quality. It seems to us that many authors or compilers of bilingual legal dictionaries do not understand how legal translations should be made. They simply make a list of legal terms in the source language and give for each term one or more words from the target language as translation without any further information on the legal context. Because of the system-specificity of legal terminology, this kind of dictionaries is practically useless. In this article, the quality of the different bilingual legal dictionaries between the languages of the Member States of the European Union will be assessed. In order to do so, some general remarks will be made first about problems with translating legal terminology. Based on those remarks, criteria for reliable bilingual dictionaries will be formulated in the next section. Finally, these criteria will be applied on the available bilingual dictionaries containing the legal language used by one or more EU Member States. In addition, statistics are presented in order to give an impression between which legal languages of the Member States of the EU bilingual legal dictionaries are available

The Quality of Legal Dictionaries::An assesment

In this article, the quality of the different bilingual legal dictionaries between the languages of the Member States of the European Union will be assessed. In order to do so, some general remarks will be made first about problems with translating legal terminology. Based on those remarks, criteria for reliable bilingual dictionaries will be formulated in the next section. Finally, these criteria will be applied on the available bilingual dictionaries containing the legal language used by one or more EU Member States. To illustrate this, we have attached an updated bibliography encompassing about 200 recently published bilingual and multilingual legal dictionaries in the European Union. The bibliography in the Annex will be the evidence for our final conclusion that most legal dictionaries must be classified as a word list, which implies here that they are of dubious quality. To date, few legal dictionaries have attempted to meet our criteria. Dictionaries that are based on comparative legal research, on the other hand, offer advantages that render them useful to professional translators

Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural Translation

The paper focuses on synonymy and polysemy in the language of law in English-speaking countries. The introductory part briefly outlines the process of legal translation and tackle the specificity of bijural translation. Then, traditional understanding of what a term is and its application to legal terminology is considered; three different levels of vocabulary used in legal texts are outlined and their relevance to bijural translation explained. Next, synonyms in the language of law are considered with respect to their intension and distribution, and examples are given to show that most expressions or phrases which are interchangeable synonyms in the general language should be treated carefully in legal translation. Finally, polysemes in legal terminology are discussed and examples given to illustrate problems potentially encountered by translators

Is the employed scholar free not to publish?:Limitations of disclosure rights in a comparative perspective

The control of works produced by academics in the course of their employment is a controversial issue. This paper examines the protection offered to employed scholars who do not want to publish their work because of the fear that premature dissemination would damage their academic reputation. The right not to publish of employed scholars has been analyzed considering Anglo-American copyright law on the one hand, and French legislation on the other. Irrespective of the differences between these jurisdictions, both positions allow labour conditions to restrict the right not to publish. On top of the comparison of three legal systems, this paper investigates the question of whether the limitations on the right of disclosure conflict with article 15, paragraph 1 c of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ICESCR. Both Anglo-American and French copyright law are not fully consistent with the protection of moral interests offered by the ICESCR. The reason is that it depends on the labour conditions whether there exists any obligation on academic employees to publish. In the absence of this obligation, the employed scholar enjoys the freedom to decide not to publish. ICESCR does not allow these limitations of disclosure rights since article 15, paragraph 1 c does not refer to working conditions

Can Capital Punishment Survive if Black Lives Matter?

Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940’s, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movement’s call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually taken such evidence to warrant reform but not outright abolition. We argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in significant part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition, we contend, rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law