Today I would like to share with you a great resource on international trade (only available in English, Spanish and French at present – sorry to the rest of you) called Juris International.
It is the result of a partnership between the International Trade Centre, the Center for Research in Public Law at the University of Montreal, Canada, and Juripole from the University of Nancy, France.
As you may know, Google Scholar allows you to search for US legal opinions (as well as patents and international journal articles).
Recently, the presentation of search results has been changed to show the extent of discussion of cited cases.
Whilst translators can use this to collect relevant reference documents, lawyers may use it to evaluate the weight of the adverse party’s arguments.
Just thought I would post a list of resources from posts up to now, for those who might have missed something (thanks to David T. for giving me the idea).
Do write to me if you have any useful resources that you would like to share with other readers of the blog.
eCPD Webinars are presenting a series of five 1-hour webinars in June and July, on legal terminology in England and Wales.
The speaker is David Hutchins of Lexacom, who teaches law and terminology at face-to-face workshops and seminars, both to translators, and to lawyers from civil code systems who are less familiar with common law.
Webinar 1, 26 June: Contracts and Contract Formation for Legal Translators
Webinars 2 & 3, 28 June: The English Legal System for Legal Interpreters and Translators
Webinars 4 & 5, 3 July: Criminal Law and Procedure for Legal Interpreters and Translators
A wonderful resource is now available on iTunesU. There are fifteen video courses, free of charge, for download, on subjects ranging from the free movement of goods, the various institutions and acts, to the Internal Market and the Integration Process.
The course has been made available by Alberto Alemanno, Associate Professor of Law at at HEC Paris, where he holds a Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law & Risk Regulation. He teaches EU law, International Economic Law, Global Antitrust and Risk Regulation. He is also Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches Global Risk Regulation, and a qualified attorney at law in New York since 2004.
France’s HEC, or Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, was listed as Best European Business School in the Financial Times overall ranking of European business schools for the 6th consecutive year in 2011.
On his blog, Alemanno also mentions an iPad version of the course coming soon.
For more about iTunesU and some iPad apps, see my post here.
After first using Termium®, the Government of Canada’s terminology and linguistic databank, when it came on a CD-ROM (anybody else remember that?), I now consult the online version from time to time.
Termium® has become quadrilingual (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese), although as yet only 18,000 words are available in Portuguese.
This week is proving to have a distinctly hispanophone flavour. That has had me dreaming about tapas of course… hoping to indulge on a possible work trip to Madrid in the near future.
Anyway, back to dictionaries. This recently published work was brought to my attention by Professor Esther Monzó at University Jaume I (Spain). She thoroughly recommends it, having had personal experience of the original glossaries.
Today I am delighted to tell you about two Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries of Mexican and US legal terminology. They were kindly brought to my attention by their author, Javier F. Becerra.
It is important to stress that the dictionaries not only provide translations of legal concepts, but also include explanations of such concepts in the target language and in some cases examples of use.
Javier studied law at the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City and after graduating in 1967, undertook postgraduate studies in England, in the field of comparative law at Cambridge University, as a member of Trinity College. He worked for more than 40 years with a leading Mexico City law firm, first as an associate and then as partner and managing partner.
I love this resource, with fast and immediate results, made available by Leipzig University’s Department of Computer Science. At present 158 languages or sub-languages have been included. The texts making up the databases are general and not specific to law.
When you enter a word, you are presented with significant co-occurrences, as well as left and right neighbours of the word, with their frequencies, and two graphical presentations – a kind of spider’s web showing related words that can be clicked on and explored.
http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/
Try it out and let me know what you think!
Now before you start getting jealous, I am not writing this on the beach. The picture (Away From Keyboard, in case you’re wondering) is just to try to combat January blues.
Today I have a wonderful discovery to share with you – the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
Abbreviations are one of things that really irritate me. Just made to exclude others who are not “in the know”. Unfortunately, we have to use, understand, and, for some of us, translate these nasty little tikes. And OK, I will admit, sometimes, they can save quite a bit of time writing out long titles. Continue reading
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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