Abstract
The practice, as well as theory, of bilingual (or multilingual) legal lexicography lags behind the practice and theory of the translation of legal texts. Dictionary making requires much deeper and more extensive knowledge of law in both the source and target language cultures than the practice of legal translation.
One of the reasons supporting this premise is that the lexicographer, compiling individual entries and looking for relevant equivalents, sooner or later resorts to a certain degree of inductive generalization since the dictionary cannot contain all possible occurrences of a particular word in all possible source language legal contexts and their target language equivalents. Legal translators, on the other hand, expect their translational legal dictionary to offer equivalents suitable and proper in their particular translation of a particular legal text in a particular legal context.
This tension between expectations and needs of legal translators and the potential of translational legal dictionaries (fully dependent upon the lexicographic expertise and translational experience of a dictionary maker) will be dealt with. The focus will be on (a) the contextuality of the process of legal translation, whose primary purpose appears to be the transmission of the sense of the source text and its segments, thus slightly suppressing the relevance of the meaning of individual words or even phrases; and (b) reflection of this contextuality in a formally constrained dictionary for legal translation.