Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

1. IntroductionThis research studies the equivalence relationship between specialized verbs that occur in acorpus of judgments produced by Portuguese and Canadian judges. By focussing on thisspecific genre of texts as well as on the Portuguese-English language pair, this study aimsat contributing to a better understanding of terminological equivalence at the same time thatit extends on previous work that has approached specialized verbs within a single language(L‘Homme 1998; Lorente 2000; Lerat 2002a; Costa and Silva 2004; Alves et al. 2005; DeVecchi and Eustachy 2008). Specifically, the study proposes a novel methodology todescribe specialized verbs and to assign their equivalents based on the theoretical model ofFrame Semantics (Fillmore 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992) and itsapplication FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010). The criteria for the assignment andvalidation of specialized verb equivalents that are presented in the research can be usefulfor the development of multilingual terminography, in general, for the development of legalterminography, in particular, as well as for the teaching and practice of specializedtranslation and terminology.1.1. Statement of the problemIt is now a commonplace that translators have to work well and fast in a globalized worldand that more and more often legal information has to be translated as a consequence of theincreasing transnational cooperation. The translation of legal texts is particularlychallenging because legal systems may differ from one linguistic community to another andeven from one country to another because each has its own history and traditions (Gémar2008). The creation of multilingual terminological resources, in general, and the creation ofmultilingual specialized lexical resources covering the specialized field of the law, inparticular, raises the problem of linking lexical information from different languagesbecause legal terminologies are said to be anisomorphic, i.e. the semantic scope of termsdiffers.