Frame-Semantic Perspectives on Bilingual Legal Dictionaries for Cross-Systemic Translation

Legal translators face the formidable task of making legal texts, embedded in a foreign legal system of reference, accessible to an expert audience in the target language. Unlike most specialized fields such as medicine or technology, this undertaking requires constant legal comparison due to the uniqueness of legal systems and the extreme system-dependence of legal terminology. Consequently, bilingual dictionaries must meet specific requirements when used as tools for legal translation, as several interlingual transfer strategies have been introduced that now coexist. This paper examines the various techniques, from identifying fully established functional equivalents to creating neologisms in the target legal language, from a frame-semantic perspective. Such an approach enables translators to examine the complex knowledge uniquely associated with linguistic signs proposed by dictionaries within specific legal systems and to make informed decisions when selecting and combining legal translation techniques to convey system-dependent legal knowledge across nations.