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Legal lexicography is the complex of activities concerned with the development of theories and principles for the design, compilation, use, and evaluation of dictionaries within the field of law, see e.g. Nielsen 1994.
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Legal lexicography is the complex of activities concerned with the development of theories and principles for the design, compilation, use, and evaluation of dictionaries within the field of law, see e.g. Nielsen 1994.
As a branch of the general discipline lexicography, legal lexicography may be divided into theoretical legal lexicography and practical legal lexicography. The result of practical legal lexicography is called a law dictionary. Law dictionaries are available in print and online.
Legal lexicography is not just about terms, but also about language and usage. Especially when making bilingual law dictionaries, the lexicographers need to take a broad view of what legal lexicography involves. Most users of bilingual law dictionaries need information about language and law, and the lexicographer's task is to present the information as clearly and structured as possible. This involves various lexicographic analyses: user research, dictionary typology, and a clear structure for presenting and linking the information in the dictionary. The information must be presented in such a way that the user is not burdened with heavy lexicographic information costs.
As pointed out in Nielsen 1994, law dictionaries can serve different functions. The traditional law dictionary with definitions of legal terms serves to help users understand the legal texts they read (a communicative function) or to help users acquire knowledge about legal matters independent of any text ( a cognitive function) – such law dictionaries are usually monolingual. Bilingual law dictionaries may serve several functions. First, they may have entry words in one language and definitions in another language – these dictionaries give help to understand legal texts, usually written in a foreign language, and to acquire knowledge, usually about a foreign legal system. Second, bilingual law dictionaries with entry words in one language and equivalents in another language provide help to translate legal texts, into or from a foreign language, and sometimes also to produce legal texts, usually in a foreign language.
The aim of legal lexicography is to suggest principles and strategies that lead to good law dictionaries. A good monolingual law dictionary will contain relevant terms with appropriate definitions, and if the purpose of the dictionary is to facilitate legal translation, e.g. a bilingual law dictionary, it will contain definitions, translation equivalents and other relevant information such as collocation and phrases in the source language and in the target language, as described in Nielsen 1994.
Based on the discussion in Nielsen 1994, there are a number of aspects that lexicographers should take into account when working with legal lexicography. One of the important aspects of legal lexicography is to establish a profile of the intended dictionary users. This is particularly significant if the dictionary is to be used by other than "native" lawyers, for instance bilingual law dictionaries for translation. A user profile should focus on the following competencies: The users' legal competence in their "native" field of law; the users' legal competence in the foreign field of law; the users' legal-language competence in their native language; the users' legal-language competence in the foreign language. When lexicographers have thus profiled the intended user group they have a clear picture of what types of data to include in the dictionary so that it can be of the most help to the users. The profile will also help lexicographers presenting the necessary data, such as definitions, in the appropriate language so that, in particular, "foreign" users can benefit from the data. The typical example is where a European continental lawyer consults an English law dictionary.
Another important aspect is the scope of coverage of a dictionary. This refers to the extent to which a law dictionary covers the field of law. The basic distinction is between general-field dictionaries and sub-field dictionaries. A general-field dictionary of law is one whose purpose is to cover the entire field of law as represented by all its subfields, and a sub-field dictionary of law is one whose purpose is to cover one or few distinct sub-fields of law, for instance a dictionary of contract law and a dictionary of family law. It is obvious that more data about the law and legal language can be included in a sub-field dictionary than in a general-field dictionary of law of the same size. The result is that sub-field dictionaries can give a much more detailed description of the law and its language than other types of dictionary.
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries, because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in an MLD use a simple and accessible defining vocabulary.
Sandro Nielsen is a Danish metalexicographer, Associate Professor at Centre for Lexicography at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark, from where he received his PhD in 1992. Nielsen has contributed to lexicography as a theoretical and practical lexicographer with particular reference to bilingual and multilingual specialised dictionaries. He is the author and co-author of more than one hundred publications on lexicography, theoretical papers, printed and electronic (online) dictionaries.
A language-for-specific-purposes dictionary is a reference work which defines the specialised vocabulary used by experts within a particular field, for example, architecture. The discipline that deals with these dictionaries is specialised lexicography. Medical dictionaries are well-known examples of the type.
A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena. The definitive book on the subject includes chapters on some of the dictionaries included below:
A law dictionary is a dictionary that is designed and compiled to give information about terms used in the field of law.
Legal translation is the translation of language used in legal settings and for legal purposes. Legal translation may also imply that it is a specific type of translation only used in law, which is not always the case. As law is a culture-dependent subject field, legal translation is not necessarily linguistically transparent. Intransparency in translation can be avoided somewhat by use of Latin legal terminology, where possible, but in non-western languages debates are centered on the origins and precedents of specific terms, such as in the use of particular Chinese characters in Japanese legal discussions.
Lexicographic information cost is a concept within the field of lexicography. The term refers to the difficulties and inconveniences that the user of a dictionary believes or feels are associated with consulting a particular dictionary or dictionary article. For example, the extensive use of abbreviations in articles in order to save space may annoy the user, because it is often difficult to read such condensed texts and understand the abbreviations, thereby increasing the lexicographic information costs.
Specialized lexicography is an academic discipline that is concerned with development of theories and principles for the design, compilation, use and evaluation of specialized dictionaries. A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena, usually within one or more subject fields. An alternative term for this type of dictionary is LSP dictionary.
Centre for Lexicography is a research centre affiliated with the Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus Denmark, and was established in 1996. The centre's aim is to carry out lexicographic research into needs-adapted information and data access, i.e. research work into dictionary theory in general and it has built a solid, international reputation in that field.
An electronic dictionary is a dictionary whose data exists in digital form and can be accessed through a number of different media. Electronic dictionaries can be found in several forms, including software installed on tablet or desktop computers, mobile apps, web applications, and as a built-in function of E-readers. They may be free or require payment.
Japanese dictionaries have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic dictionaries. According to Nakao Keisuke (中尾啓介):
It has often been said that dictionary publishing in Japan is active and prosperous, that Japanese people are well provided for with reference tools, and that lexicography here, in practice as well as in research, has produced a number of valuable reference books together with voluminous academic studies. (1998:35)
A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be unidirectional, meaning that they list the meanings of words of one language in another, or can be bidirectional, allowing translation to and from both languages. Bidirectional bilingual dictionaries usually consist of two sections, each listing words and phrases of one language alphabetically along with their translation. In addition to the translation, a bilingual dictionary usually indicates the part of speech, gender, verb type, declension model and other grammatical clues to help a non-native speaker use the word. Other features sometimes present in bilingual dictionaries are lists of phrases, usage and style guides, verb tables, maps and grammar references. In contrast to the bilingual dictionary, a monolingual dictionary defines words and phrases instead of translating them.
A foreign language writing aid is a computer program or any other instrument that assists a non-native language user in writing decently in their target language. Assistive operations can be classified into two categories: on-the-fly prompts and post-writing checks. Assisted aspects of writing include: lexical, syntactic, lexical semantic and idiomatic expression transfer, etc. Different types of foreign language writing aids include automated proofreading applications, text corpora, dictionaries, translation aids and orthography aids.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Reinhard Rudolf Karl Hartmann is an Austrian and English lexicographer and applied linguist. Until the 1970s, lexicographers worked in relative isolation, and Hartmann is credited with making a major contribution to lexicography and fostering interdisciplinary consultation between reference specialists.
Ultralingua is a single-click and drag-and-drop multilingual translation dictionary, thesaurus, and language reference utility. The full suite of Ultralingua language tools is available free online without the need for download and installation. As well as its online products, the developer offers premium downloadable language software with extended features and content for Macintosh and Windows computer platforms, smartphones, and other hand held devices.
An explanatory combinatorial dictionary (ECD) is a type of monolingual dictionary designed to be part of a meaning-text linguistic model of a natural language. It is intended to be a complete record of the lexicon of a given language. As such, it identifies and describes, in separate entries, each of the language's lexemes and phrasemes. Among other things, each entry contains (1) a definition that incorporates a lexeme's semantic actants (2) complete information on lexical co-occurrence ; (3) an extensive set of examples. The ECD is a production dictionary — that is, it aims to provide all the information needed for a foreign learner or automaton to produce perfectly formed utterances of the language. Since the lexemes and phrasemes of a natural language number in the hundreds of thousands, a complete ECD, in paper form, would occupy the space of a large encyclopaedia. Such a work has yet to be achieved; while ECDs of Russian and French have been published, each describes less than one percent of the vocabulary of the respective languages.
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in over 90 languages.