Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

2Up to the present, multilingual resources that describe legal terminology have notincluded all the equivalents that translators need to produce translations of legal texts. Thisis particularly true with regard to specialized lexical resources covering the specialized fieldof the law in language pairs, such as Portuguese-English-Portuguese. As de Groot and vanLaer (2008) explain in their assessment of the quality of the different bilingual legaldictionaries between the languages of the Member States of the European Union European,the Portuguese-English legal dictionaries correspond to ―word list dictionaries‖, i.e. ―thosebilingual or multilingual lists of terms offering unsubstantiated translations; equivalence isassumed; no explanation as to different meanings is offered‖ (de Groot and van Laer 2008:9).What is more, terminological resources have for a very long time neglected thedescription of predicative units, such as verbs. Over the years, however, some authors havesought to understand the lack of interest in terms belonging to parts of speech other thannouns as well as their weak presence in terminological resources (L‘Homme 1998; Lorenteand Bevilacqua 2000; Costa and Silva 2004). One of the reasons why terminology has beenmostly interested in nouns lies in the importance given in the Wüsterian approach to objectsand their designations. Nevertheless, some researchers have argued that specializedknowledge is not limited to objects but that it also extends to actions (L‘Homme 2003; DeVecchi and Estachy 2008).In fact, verbs should be included in multilingual terminological resources, ingeneral, and in resources covering the specialized field of law, in particular, because theypose three different but intertwined types of problem: decoding, encoding and translation.For example, although a translator may know the general meaning of the verb absolver(Eng. to acquit) as in absolver o réu do crime (Eng. to acquit the defendant of the crime),s/he may not know the meaning and the equivalent of absolver when it occurs as absolver oréu da instância (Eng. literally, the defendant is acquitted from the court). In addition, a