Medical + Legal Dictionary Recommendations?

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
So the license for the 2.9-million-term technical dictionary we were hoping to release this summer fell through, unfortunately - we had a deal worked out, but some concerns came up about potential copyright violations on the publisher's end which they were unable to satisfactorily answer; more the fault of one of their subcontractors, but a deal-killer regardless.

Anyway, this now means that we're once again on the hunt for some good subject-specific dictionaries, and the two most consistently requested subjects are medicine and law - does anyone in those fields (or generally in the know about such things) have any recommendations for particularly good dictionaries? Note that we are not currently able to license dictionaries from Commercial Press, so any dictionaries from them are unfortunately not going to be options for this.

Also, if there's any other subject-specific dictionary you'd like to chime in for (except TCM, which we've already got in the works) we're certainly happy to consider those too.
 
G

gato

状元
What was the name of the legal dictionary you were looking at?

元照 is considered to the most comprehensive E-to-C legal dictionary on the market. I have a copy of it, though I don't use it that much since I don't do much translation work.
http://product.dangdang.com/product.asp ... id=9245672
元照英美法词典

There is also this smaller E-C legal dictionary.
http://product.dangdang.com/product.asp ... d=20140926
英汉法律词典(第三版)

A problem with E-C legal dictionary, as least for mainland China purposes, is that the Chinese equivalent for many English legal terms are not firmly settled yet. The dictionary authors are sometimes making up the Chinese equivalent the best they, but the practitioners on the ground may not use the same terminologies.
 
N

numble

状元
Is there a Russian-Chinese or German-Chinese legal dictionary out there (I'm guessing there are Russian-English, and German-English legal dictionaries)?

The legal system is not based on Anglo common law systems (I think a lot of it derives from Soviet/German civil systems), so there are terms that probably don't have English equivalents, or don't make sense--even if you translate 检察院 to "Procuratorate," I still wouldn't know what that is.

It's something I would be interested in, but it feels like a Chinese word to English encyclopedia entry (and vice versa) might also be very useful.

Would that ever be possible? (Example: search for 检察院, and it pops you to the English page for "Procuratorate"--the link for the english page is listed on the Chinese entry for 检察院).
 
G

gato

状元
It's the same thing as the prosecutor's office. I think it's a mistranslation because if you google procuratorate, all the results are about China. No English-speaking country uses the term. They must have gotten from Latin or something. Because most of the Chines dictionary editors don't have experience living in English-speaking countries, it's not unusual for them to use very non-idiomatic terms as translations.
http://www.google.com/m/search?q=procur ... n=8e25b963
Google procuratorate
 
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