Tendencies of legal terms representation in English and Russian monolingual terminological dictionaries

Abstract

Currently, there is a lot of terminological dictionaries, most of them operate online quite successfully. The widespread use of legal terminology in the texts of various themes and style is explained by the fact that these dictionaries are popular not only among legal professionals, but also among the professionals working with languages: translators, teachers, journalists and others. Therefore, their entries shall be provided with all the components necessary to clarify not only the meaning but also the grammatical peculiarities of word pronunciation, as well as the peculiarities of their proper use. The relevance of an article is in the need of improvement and adaptation of this type of dictionaries for the needs of a wide range of experts. The aim of our study is to analyze the microstructure of modern monolingual dictionary of legal terms and the determination of their representation trends. During the work, we used the comparative analysis method concerning the structure and the content of the entries from modern lexicographical sources concerning legal terminology, as well as the method of dictionary definition component analysis in respect of English and Russian legal terms. The performed analysis showed that the entries of legal term monolingual dictionaries considered by us The People's Law Dictionary (compilers J. Hill, Christopher Hill, 2002) and the Great Law Dictionary (compiled by A.Y. Sukharev, V.E. Krutskikh and A.Ya. Sukhareva, 2003), presented in the electronic version, are organized on the basis of logical and conceptual approach. The entries are provided with a scientific definition with the necessary explanations and show the associative parameters of a title unit. The formal parameters are reflected only in the English-language dictionary in the form of the part of speech specification. The linguistic characteristics of the borrowed terms are presented by the information about the pronunciation and etymology features of a title word. However, the capital units of the studied dictionaries do not have the instruction concerning their linguistic characteristics such as reference word forms, possible phrases and so on, which are important for the professionals working with a language. Also, the entries do not have the examples of use from written sources, which are designed to characterize additionally the semantic and grammatical features of words, clarify the scope of their use, support standards and provide the guidance for the proper use. The results of the performed study allows us to establish the possible trends of their development and the possible ways to improve the monolingual dictionaries of legal terms in order to improve their informational content and an effective use of various fields of knowledge by experts.