Dictionaries in Context, Context in Dictionaries: Legal Translation Tools

Abstract

Translators work with context and legal translation dictionaries may be tools that provide such context. However, lexicographers distinguish between different types of contexts, so it is relevant to examine which types of contexts are needed to help legal translators, bearing in mind that legal translation is an interdisciplinary activity involving competences and skills relating to law, language, and translation. Furthermore, legal translation involves a decoding, a transfer, and an encoding phase, each requiring different types of contexts from legal translation dictionaries. An examination of context in legal translation dictionaries treating the languages Danish, English, French, German, and Norwegian reveals that it may be necessary to distinguish between the context of dictionaries as information tools (dictionaries in context) and the context relating to the data they contain (context in dictionaries). Placing dictionaries in context concerns their format, size, scope, content, use, and user groups, while placing context in dictionaries concerns pragmatic contexts, syntactic-semantic contexts, and context of use related to source-language as well as target-language items, including concepts, terms, collocations, phrases, translation equivalents, example sentences, dictionary-internal cross-references, and dictionary-external references. Keywords: law, terminology, phraseology, bilingual dictionaries, translation dictionaries, contextual data, contextualization, legal lexicography