Odd Entries in Legal Dictionaries
Odd Entries in Legal Dictionaries

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on bilingual legal dictionaries published in Romania over a period of 15 years (1999–2014). While trying to create a bilingual term base (Romanian-English) for computer assisted translation tools, we encountered different types of entries, which – in our opinion – are difficult to explain why they are included in legal dictionaries. While presenting examples belonging to various fields (e.g. biology, geography, politics, religion or economy), we will also discuss politically incorrect translations, for which there may be various explanations. As the paper stems from a larger POSDRU project, we also deal with current issues regarding the importance of published dictionaries compared to (online) term bases from various points of view, such as relevance, quality, number of entries, reliability, efficiency, or search options. We think that our results are at least surprising, as they re-shape even one of the most basic dictionary requirements, namely alphabetical order for the Romanian language when diacritical marks are involved.

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