Towards a better treatment of phraseology in specialized bilingual dictionaries : the case of Arabic-English dictionaries of law

Abstract EN

Specialized dictionaries are characterized by the specificity of their wordlists which belong to specialized fields and the particularity of their entries which are centered on definitions, i.e.

the linguistic descriptions of concepts placed at the heart of the onomasiological approach of terminology/terminography.

It remains that terms are not the only salient feature of specialized texts, as phraseology, including specialized collocations and set phrases, is essential and distinctive of any specialized text.

The problem is that the terminographic reference works which include phraseology in their macro or microstructures are very rare.

Arabic-English legal dictionaries represent a case in point.

In the present paper, the author demonstrates the inadequate treatment of phraseology in some English-Arabic legal dictionaries and suggests more appropriate macro and micro-structures of a more comprehensive Arabic-English legal dictionary.

To show the pertinence and relevance of such terminographic approach, he focuses on legal terms and their collocates and set phrases, which are frequently used in the most typical documents of Moroccan notaries public of Islamic law (adoul).