Abstract
Following rapid technological developments, the need has arisen for online legal dictionaries. Czech translators and interpreters, linguists, lawyers, and law students rely on a decades old printed Czech-English legal dictionary; yet a printed dictionary offers very limited flexibility to adapt to the changes in legal terminology.
Private law in the Czech Republic was fundamentally reformed in 2012 by passing the Civil Code, the Business Corporations Act and the Private International Law Act. This private law restatement significantly changed civil law terminology compared to the 1964 Civil Code, but this change has not been reflected in legal lexicography.
Charles University in Prague offers a course for prospective court translators, focusing on the Czech law and English legal terminology. The participants and other persons facing the challenge of translating continental law concepts into the language of common law could significantly benefit from an online Czech-English dictionary as a way to improve the quality of court interpretation and translation.
This contribution presents information on an initiative undertaken at the Department of Foreign Languages at Charles University Faculty of Law to launch a project for an online Czech-English legal dictionary. The project is underpinned by a needs analysis based on a survey among the participants of the court translators course.
The main aim of the project is to create an online Czech-English legal dictionary covering the legal terminology introduced by the 2012 private law reform with a user-friendly interface, sufficiently flexible to adapt to the changing circumstances and evolving legal terminology.