Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

70that he reiterates and completes in 1999. The emphasis on conceptual relationsunderlies Sandrini‘s critical view on textual equivalence for use in terminographybecause he considers that it is the translator‘s responsibility and not theterminographer‘s to judge the particular communicative situation where the equivalentsare to be inserted. To sum up, for Sandrini, dictionaries should be elaborated for legalsystems and not for languages.From our point of view, this approach is valid but not sufficiently ambitious.We agree that the documentation of concepts is unavoidable in legal terminography andwe also understand that legal concepts are most of the times vague because their fullmeaning can only be grasped when interpreted in and applied to a specific legalsituation. However, it seems to us that a terminographic resource built in these mouldsis not only empowering translators to make the right decisions about the terminologywith which they are dealing. Rather, on the basis that there is no such thing as perfectequivalence, this approach is also avoiding the task of searching for the best possibleequivalents and of documenting the reasons why they are the best possible equivalentsonly. It is a well-known fact that, nowadays, translators have less and less time to dotheir work. If they merely look up a documentation resource like the one Sandriniproposes, then they will need some time not only to make a decision on the bestequivalent but also to find the correct usage of the equivalent term.For all these reasons, we believe that a suitable resource for legal translatorswould be a lexical resource that documents the concepts of the specialized field as wellas the linguistic behaviour of terms. This resource would allow users to make bothonomasiological and semasiological queries so as to meet the reception and productionneeds of translators. In this research, we propose to describe the extralinguisticinformation of the subject field by means of semantic frames, or conceptual scenarios(Fillmore 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992). Semantic frames are