The Mendik Library, within New York Law School, brings together a list of resources for free or low cost legal research. The focus is on the American legal system, but the materials could be useful to many legal translators.
As NYLS says, the resources are also a great way to get started with research if you don’t have access to paid databases or if you want to get an overview of a topic before using potentially expensive searches. Continue reading
India newspapers have recently been reporting that Qanoon Lugat, a law dictionary in Urdu, billed as a first of its kind in the country, has been published.
The dictionary, encompassing 52,000 legal terms, has been translated in Urdu for the first time, according to chief translator and Supreme Court advocate Muhammad Irshad Hanif.
For anyone who has recently starting working in the language pair French to English, or those who might not already have heard of it, the Council of Europe French-English Legal dictionary by F.H.S. Bridge, published in 1998, is a well-known and highly regarded resource.
The dictionary contains some 11,000 entries. One of the best things about it from my point of view is the layout – most words are given as a kind of heading showing words below that often collocate with it, as you can see from the image below – just click to enlarge.
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.
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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