Description of English language content
TransLegal Dictionary
TransLegal’s Learner’s Dictionary of Law is the only dictionary of law designed specifically to help lawyers and law students working in English as a second language. Native English-speaking lawyers often use an English law dictionary differently than lawyers who are non-native speakers of English. Lawyers for whom English is a second language often need to know how to use the word in a sentence, how to pronounce the word, what common mistakes to avoid (e.g. false friends) and the most common collocations (= words that go with the word looked up, such as file a lawsuit or grant an appeal). TransLegal’s Law Dictionary has been designed with these specific needs in mind. The TransLegal Learner’s Dictionary of Law is the product of thousands of hours of on-going research carried out by an expert team of lawyer-linguists. Every term included in the TransLegal Learner’s Dictionary of Law has been thoroughly researched to ensure that the definitions reflect current usage. Each definition has been graded so that it can be understood by intermediate-level speakers of English. Where more complex language has been unavoidable in the definitions, this language has been defined in parentheses. Corpora such as the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American Language and onecle.com’s collection of legal documents were referred to for the phrase bank entries, providing a selection of examples of contemporary usage together with common collocations. Corpora, legal texts and authoritative guides to contemporary usage (e.g. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage) were referred to when developing the additional notes and common errors sections, together with examples and illustrations collected by TransLegal’s lawyer-linguists during their teaching and materials development.
练习
Our exercises feature a range of task types designed to train the essential vocabulary of law. The tasks also help lawyers develop the reading and listening skills needed to work in English as a lingua franca. The exercises are based on a vast bank of texts covering the major areas of commercial law, together with other key areas such as public law, criminal law and English for Academic Legal Purposes.
视频
Our video lessons cover a wide range of topics from specialist areas of law through to commonly confused terms. The clips are engaging, and are written and presented by our team of British and American lawyers. A further benefit of the videos is the exposure to a number of different accents and presentation styles. Further support is provided by the transcripts, which can be used in conjunction with the videos to help develop learners’ vocabulary, grammar and knowledge of important collocations and lexical chunks (= word partnerships).
.
Posts
Our dictionary has been designed to give short, clear descriptions for lawyers with English as a second language who need to understand a term quickly. However, lawyers will sometimes need more background information. Our posts have been produced with this need in mind by our team of lawyer-linguists, each with their own areas of specialist legal expertise.
CEFR level
The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is a guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries (for example, Colombia and the Philippines). It was produced by the Council of Europe. Its main aim is to provide a method of learning, teaching and assessing which applies to all languages in Europe. Our corpus-informed dictionary features definitions graded at B2 level on the CEFR. Using plain language to clarify the terms rather than simplify them, complex legal concepts are made more accessible to learners of English. The CEFR provides a common basis for language education in the key areas of curriculum development, the design of teaching and learning materials, and the assessment of foreign language proficiency. One of its main achievements has been to develop a comprehensive set of scaled descriptions of the components of language proficiency at all levels across a range of skills. For example, a learner of English at B2 level can perform a number of relatively complex tasks, including asking questions for clarification when following a presentation, understanding the general meaning of both routine and non-routine correspondence, and writing reports and correspondence.
Relevancy
The relevancy of the results shown after a search is one of the cornerstones of a successful search database. TransLegal ensures that the results returned upon a search of a legal term are accurate and relevant by manually linking exercises, videos, dictionary entries, posts and other Legal English materials to the relevant terms. This means that TransLegal does not use algorithms or other automated systems to predict relevancy. Instead, the lawyer-linguists at TransLegal have manually matched each database entry to the legal terms relevant to it in order to ensure that the results are highly relevant.
