I just had to share with you a great resource that I found recently. It is published by a firm of notaries that has its offices in Place Vendôme (for those that are unfamiliar with the address, it also houses some of the finest jewelers in Paris and is arguably one of its most beautiful squares…).
Tag Archives: legal
Problematic terms of art used in contracts
I am delighted to present a guest post today from Kenneth A. Adams. According to the Canadian periodical The Lawyers Weekly, “In the world of contract drafting, Ken Adams is the guru.” His book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting is widely used throughout the legal profession. He gives seminars in the U.S., Canada, and internationally, acts as a consultant and expert witness, and is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Ken’s blog contains a multitude of posts about specific terms and issues relating to contract drafting. The post below contains a number of links (terms in red) – by clicking you can find out more about each term. Over to you Ken!
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Termium® becomes quadrilingual and has a special legal section
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.
Legal Language Explorer
The Google N-grams tool (see my recent post and update) has now fostered a new application to search 200 years of US Supreme Court decisions: Legal Language Explorer. It has been developed by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law, Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, and their colleagues.
The tool is lightning fast, and I really like the way that the corpus tool allows you to click through to list of cases and then to see the original text, and to export lists to Excel, for example. I also support the move, of which the authors are part, to make more full-text legal resources openly available to the public.
Click here to see a presentation of the service, given at the conference JURIX 2011 in mid-December. Bommarito has also posted a more technical description of the project on his blog.
You can try out the web-based interface here. Let me know what you think!
Thanks to Rob L. indirectly via Australia, and Robert at Legal Informatics Blog for bringing the project to my attention.
A selection of useful iPad apps
The rise of iPad adoption by legal professionals (see this article and this survey) is largely because it is so light and easy to carry around. The tablet can also be a useful way for translators to store and access a wide selection of documentary resources, including (heavy!) dictionaries offline wherever they are. In the academic world, uptake seems more limited for the moment, but there is a wealth of tools that researchers could take advantage of, as you will see below.
Hopefully this post will give you a few new ideas. I have included only those apps that I find really useful, but of course there are many more, including in other languages. Do share your favourites with us by adding a comment below this post or sending me an email. Continue reading
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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