Category Archives: Resources

Tax word soup

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Now given that tax is a serious matter, I couldn’t really include this in a Monday smiles post, but this selection of taxes from Wordnik is both interesting from a lexical point of view (I certainly hadn’t heard of “pannage”, “piccage”, or “scutage” before!), and also quite fun (a *beard* tax?!).

You may know of or use Wordnik (I posted about it here – The dictionary on steroids) – a useful dictionary resource also including a thesaurus, examples, contexts, and even tweets.

Stainless steel pot with coverHere is a taster of the tax word soup, but you will find the link to the full list below. Enjoy!

  • A beard tax
  • A chimney tax
  • The sheriff-tooth tax
  • A tax on candles

You can find more taxes as well as definitions and histories on the Wordnik blog here.

Bijural terminology records

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This is a great resource for translators working with French and English – the Canadian Department of Justice has published individual factsheets or “records” for terms that have been the subject of legislative harmonization between the common law and civil law systems. The records include many legal concepts (one of the trickiest things to translate 😉 ) so I think it’s really useful.

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New features on Google Scholar for US case law

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Search Button On KeyboardThe Google Scholar interface (scholar.google.[com or your country code]) is named for its function of searching academic articles. However, it has ‘hidden’ extras – such as a search of patents, and a search of US case law.

Since the end of last year, the search can be refined by court jurisdiction – as you can see from the partial screenshot below (click to enlarge). The search can also be filtered by date range.

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Juricourriels

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Enveloppe blancheToday’s post is especially for the French speakers among you. The juricourriels (literally translated ‘legal emails’) are an initiative of the Centre de ressources en français juridique at the Université de Saint-Boniface in Canada to encourage those in the legal sector to read, on a regular basis, a short text of a legal nature highlighting a term or expression, a legal concept, a mini-glossary (FR/EN), or a legal summary. They relate in particular to the Canadian legal context, but may well be of interest to all those working with French.

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Polish WordNet

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plwordnet_logoFollowing Wednesday’s post about the Bengali WordNet, I have received information about the Polish version.

The Polish wordnet – plWordNet – is a semantic network which reflects the Polish lexical system. The first ever WordNet was built in the late 1980s at Princeton University (see this post). plWordNet is one of few such resources built not by translating the English WordNet, but from the ground up, in a joint effort of lexicographers and computer scientists.  It can be browsed online here: http://plwordnet.pwr.wroc.pl/wordnet/. It is the second largest wordnet in the world.

If you would like to read more about designing wordnets, see this book: http://nlp.pwr.wroc.pl/en/ksiazki/92/show/publication

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Professor Stan Szpakowicz for granting permission to publish this post.