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Compilations of Law Dictionaries in New China and Their Roles on Standardization of Translated Legal Terms

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Abstract

From the perspectives of foreign-Chinese bilingual law dictionaries, Chinese-foreign bilingual law dictionaries, and monolingual Chinese law dictionaries, this paper reviews the compilation and publication of law dictionaries in China over the past six decades following the founding of New China in 1949, especially over the past three decades after the policy of reform and opening up was adopted in 1978. This paper reevaluates the translated legal terms covered and defined in the Legal Dictionary of the Soviet Union (1957), Law Dictionary (1980), Oxford Large Dictionary of Law (1988), Chinese-English Glossary of Terms of Laws and Regulations of People’s Republic of China (1998) and English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-American Law (2003) to analyze the roles of law dictionaries on the standardization of the translated Chinese legal terms.

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Notes

  1. In 2012, this number is about 220. See Qu’s [27].

  2. For more information about the history in this period, see He [11, 12].

  3. For evaluation of this dictionary, see Chen [2] and Liu [17].

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Chinese Ministry of Justice Project (12SFB3007). The author especially wants to thank Miss Qinchen Ding, Miss Gewei Chen, and Mr. Jixu Zhan for their translation assistance.

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Correspondence to Wensheng Qu.

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Qu, W. Compilations of Law Dictionaries in New China and Their Roles on Standardization of Translated Legal Terms. Int J Semiot Law 28, 449–467 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9408-y

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