A new online resource for legal interpreters and translators has recently become available thanks to Vancouver Community College. A team of language professionals collaborated to compile an online legal dictionary consisting of 5000 Canadian legal and court-related terms in English, as well as six other languages: Chinese, Farsi, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. This multilingual glossary of legal terms can be found here: Multilingual Legal Glossary
The resource is the result of the collaborative efforts of terminologists, bilingual lawyers, legal translators, and linguists, as well as other qualified and experienced members of the legal and multicultural communities of both Canada and the country of origin of each language included.
A quick search of one commonly used legal term, “defendant,” yielded excellent results in Spanish, providing a thorough definition for the term in both English and Spanish. This is an excellent resource for anyone working within the legal arena, especially legal translators in Canada. While the dictionary aims to “explain Canadian legal terminology and to provide foreign language equivalents for concepts related to Canadian law,” many of the included concepts and terms are universal across the English language.
Add this site to your working list of references and support Vancouver Community College’s efforts! To help spread the word, ALTA is going to add a link on the Free Resources for Translators page. I hope to see more online reference resources of this nature in the coming years.