Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

3translator can understand the meaning of the verb acordar (Eng. to agree), but s/he may notbe aware that in the judgments of the Supreme Court of Portugal, this verb is veryfrequently followed by the preposition em (Eng. in) and never by the usual prepositionscom (Eng. with) and entre (Eng. between).For these reasons, translation-oriented terminography should concentrate on a high―level of detail of cross-linguistic information without which it is difficult, if notimpossible, to provide accurate resources for efficient communication across languageboundaries‖ (Boas 2005: 445). Although it will be demonstrated that there are sometheoretical frameworks that combine the description of the linguistic and extralinguisticcharacteristics of specialized verbs, it will be argued that the literature is silent when itcomes to proposing sound methodologies for the search of equivalents.1.2. Objectives of the researchThe most important objective of the research is the definition of criteria for validating theequivalents of specialized verbs. In order to do so, the research proposes a methodology fordescribing specialized verbs that occur in a comparable corpus of Portuguese and Englishjudgments as well as a methodology for assigning their equivalents. The findings of thestudy should bring about criteria for justifying why a specialized verb in one language is amore or less suitable equivalent of a specialized verb in a different language. Anotherspecific objective of the research is to test the applicability of the theoretical model ofFrame Semantics (Fillmore 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992) and of theFrameNet methodology (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) to the aforementioned objectives as wellas to the elaboration of multilingual lexical resources that describe legal terminology.By knowing what causes a specialized verb in one language to be a more or lesssuitable equivalent of a specialized verb in another language, the research aims to better