Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Affairs and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of different print and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main features of certain bilingual legal dictionaries with the English-Arabic and French-Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help fill existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specific details that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation.

Full text

Int J Semiot Law (2024) 37:243–257
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10059-2
Abstract
The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential
building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has
implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs
of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of dierent print
and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related
parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main
features of certain bilingual legal dictionaries with the English-Arabic and French-
Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools
available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the
contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward
the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion
of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help
ll existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of
information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specic details
that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to
opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation.
Keywords Legal dictionaries · Arabic resources · Ontologies · Legal translation ·
Arabic translation
1 Context
The international legal context is characterized by a process of legal globalization,
giving rise to a need for legal translation in numerous situations, including the imple-
mentation of international standards in the eld of human rights (ex. communica-
Accepted: 20 September 2023 / Published online: 21 October 2023
© The Author(s) 2023
Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and
Future Perspectives
Sonia A.Halimi1
Sonia A. Halimi
Sonia.Halimi@unige.ch
1 Faculty of translation and interpreting, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
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S. A. Halimi
tions to the Human Rights Council, actions to the International Criminal Court, etc.),
mutual legal assistance between States (letters by rogatory commissions, etc.), inter-
national corporate collaboration (contracts, assurance services, etc.), international
immigration (ocial documents like family registers, diplomas, etc.), etc. In that
sense, legal translation contributes not only to giving laypeople access to a legal text
written in a language that is not their own, but also maintaining international coopera-
tion, international public policy and diplomatic relations [22, 30].
Legal translation from and into Arabic is relevant to all the aforementioned situa-
tions, as Arabic is one of the working languages in international multilingual institu-
tions, and, more specically, the United Nations (UN) and its specialized agencies. It
is also a vivid illustration of the expansion of diverse language use around the world,
particularly on the internet, where Arabic has become among the most widely used
languages in recent years [44]. However, the evident linguistic dierences between
Arabic, as a Semitic language, and other Indo-European languages—English or
French, for instance—on lexical and syntactic levels unequivocally pose additional
problems when rendering texts into Arabic. When it comes to the legal eld, in addi-
tion to challenges that arise due to language barriers, there are also legal specici-
ties and inter-cultural dierences related to national systems that must be taken into
consideration. Working with legal material entails dealing with information on legal
realities and traditions that involve dierent conceptual and procedural referents.
Understanding legal systems and their functioning is therefore benecial for any
kind of information handling, a fortiori translation. More specically, in multilingual
international settings, much of the legal material includes national sources of law,
which leads to issues of interpenetration between legal systems, variability of con-
cepts and a need to contextualize the terminology that is generated, all of which has
an impact on translation choices.
Comparative legal translation studies [14, 33, 41, 47, 52] have widely explored
the challenges posed by texts that transcend national laws, and led to legal translation
methods, models and frames. With regard to term conceptualization, the evolution of
legal lexicography is reected in works where the emphasis is given to a back-and-
forth movement between law and terminology, informed by real-life legal cases [8,
37, 43]. The making of legal resources is thus supplemented by conceptualization and
legal knowledge transfer bringing new insights into the legal dictionary.
In Arabic legal studies, while corpus and comparative-based studies had been the
subject of recent, high-prole studies (for a summary, see [26]), the discipline of
legal-dictionary making has traditionally been related to the theory and practice of
lexicography in general (see Sect. 3). Legal terminology is addressed through a tra-
ditional approach of concept description and term listing. Dierent types of legal
lexicographic tools are available in print and online. They may be lists of special-
ized terms in the form of glossaries, terms with linguistic knowledge that constitute
lexical databases, terms with denitions for monolingual, bilingual or multilingual
dictionaries, hierarchically represented vocabulary in thesauri, and bitexts in paral-
lel corpora for contextual searches. However, they do not adopt a lexicographical
approach to the semantics of legal concepts.
Against this background, examining features of the main legal dictionaries for
translation seems appropriate to set the state of art of Arabic legal resources. As not
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Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and Future…
all resources can be covered in this study, an emphasis is put on the English – Arabic
and French – Arabic language pairs. Three research questions guided this descriptive
study:
1) How have bilingual dictionaries in some European languages developed in recent
decades?
2) What are the main features of English-Arabic and French-Arabic legal
dictionaries?
3) How to reach concept matching in bilingual legal resources?
As there is no inventory of the available online and print legal resources for Arabic
translation, we will rst provide an overview of existing tools, the problems they
present, and potential solutions. In Sect. 2, we give a brief account of the state of
certain legal bilingual dictionaries in European languages and the developments that
have been made. In Sect. 3, we examine print legal bilingual dictionaries that include
Arabic, highlighting their features and limitations. An assessment of online resources
for Arabic legal translation is provided in Sect. 4, opening up new prospects for using
ontology to address legal translation problems. Concluding remarks are presented in
Sect. 5.
2 Bilingual Dictionaries in European Languages and Recent
Resources
Precursor studies initially gave rise to an interest in bilingual legal dictionaries [17,
45, 46, 48]. Through the analysis and comparison of bilingual legal dictionaries, dif-
ferent conceptions of the law in various legal cultures emerged. The specicities of
the laws, in terms of legal vocabulary, classications and categories, justify the use of
a comparative approach. The meaning of a legal concept therefore goes beyond what
an ordinary bilingual dictionary can tell us.
In one of the rst studies conducted by de Groot and van Laer [17], two decades
ago, to evaluate bilingual legal dictionaries used in the EU community, the quality of
the resources reviewed was considered ‘poor’ due to the limited encyclopaedic infor-
mation they contain and the absence of systematic references to the legal systems of
the terms being handled. Previously, while conducting research that led to the elabo-
ration of a bilingual legal dictionary, Thiry [49] had already taken note of the literal-
ness of words in bilingual terminology. This not only revealed a certain carelessness
when it comes to choosing terminology and creating lexicon, but above all reected a
lack of system-related knowledge that is closely tied to the kind of knowledge that is
necessary to express legal information in a specic language. Since then, the eort to
improve the design of specialized dictionaries has favored systematized models with
more encyclopaedic knowledge to facilitate the search for relevant information and
treat the notion not as an isolated unit, but as a representation that ts into its own
notional system.
A renewal of lexicographical and terminological production in European lan-
guages has led, in recent decades, to remarkable progress in the designing of lin-
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S. A. Halimi
guistic and lexicographical resources, and the innovative development of bilingual
dictionaries in the legal eld. Some dictionaries are particularly noteworthy for their
conceptual organization of a particular eld and the extensive amount of concepts
analyzed. They are useful to translators, thanks to the denitions and characteris-
tics they provide through comparisons of concepts in dierent legal systems. This
contextualization promoted by comparative law has given rise to a newfound aware-
ness of the necessity of looking beyond the denition of an isolated legal term. This
kind of approach is well-illustrated by the bilingual French-Spanish dictionary on
Extra-Contractual Civil Liability in Spanish and Belgian law [47]. The dictionary is
organized based on the elaboration of notional schemes in that specic eld, giving
primacy to the notional in the original content of each of the legal systems being
compared.
Other legal dictionaries have focused on how terminology is handled by branch
of law in two comparative legal systems. They thus provide detailed information on
the subject matter and complement general legal dictionaries. The Manuel of Termi-
nologie juridique et administrative internationale, German-French [27], for example,
provides denitions of the most important terms in Labour Law and Social Security
Law in the source language and in-depth explanations of the conceptual dierences
between the two legal systems – German and French – thus allowing the concepts to
be understood in their original context.
We may also cite Kaufmann’s Dictionary of Labour Law and Social Security Law,
German-French and French-German, Dictionnaire de droit du travail et de droit de
la sécurité sociale, allemand-français et français-allemand [29], which presents the
two national elds of law of public ocials in Germany (droit des Agents de la puis-
sance publique) and sta of public services and public companies in France (Per-
sonnel des services publics et des entreprises publiques) through vocabulary that is
classied by subject and includes denitions, explanations, and specic phrases. The
systematic description and comparison of concepts facilitates the understanding of
system-related dierences.
Continuing along the lines of the comparatist approach, Peñaranda [39] describes
the terminology of criminal procedure (English-Spanish and French-Spanish), high-
lighting translational problems related to asymmetry between criminal proceedings.
Monjean-Decaudin [34] proposed contextualized term records that led to the devel-
opment of a juritraductology base that continues to be maintained, but can only be
accessed by the members of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Juritraductol-
ogy. Each term entry (che juritraductologique) is rich with terminological elements
and describes in detail the semasiological and onomasiological phases of the juritra-
ductological process, before putting forward a translation proposal. In parallel, the
results of the LAW10n project (Localisation of technology law: software licensing
agreements) [43] show the usefulness of a contextualized lexicographic approach,
which combines corpora analysis and comparative law methodology by specifying,
for each entry, the type of translation (instrumental or documentary), depending on
the translation scenario. Conversely, it also reveals the limitations of terminological
databases that rely only on the conceptual system of the source language. Bajcić
[8] addressed the methodological evolution of legal lexicography by exploring the
semantics of legal concepts and the legal dictionary. The perception of term meaning
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Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and Future…
as a dynamic process which involves conceptual knowledge in the give-and-take of
law and terminology is highlighted and integrated in the making of a legal dictionary
as part of the cognitive terminological approach.
Recent research in multilingual legal terminology management has been oriented
towards using institutional big data. In legal terminology management, the LETRINT
project (Legal Translation in International Institutional Settings: Scope, Strategies
and Quality Markers) (2015–2022), for example, draws upon three institutional cor-
pora from the UN, European Union (EU), and the World Trade Organization (WTO)
to develop translation quality markers in international institutional settings, focusing
on context-based specicities of terminology [42]. Using document mapping tech-
nology, the LYNX project (2017–2021) relies on EU legal big data and articial
intelligence to provide eective ways of accessing immense quantities of digital reg-
ulatory documents (national legislations, case laws, industry norms, etc.) based on a
Legal Knowledge Graph [32]. Legal ad hoc terminologies presented by corpus and in
readable-machine format are linked and structured in semantic web form.
These developments are realized in the Indo-European languages with regard to
legal dictionaries and concept search tools. Where do matters stand for Arabic legal
resources? In order to answer the question, it seems right as corollary to start by
outlining features of bilingual legal dictionaries in, specically, English-Arabic and
French-Arabic language pairs.
3 Bilingual Legal Dictionaries for Arabic: Features and Limitations
Studies conducted by Arabic-speaking linguists and lexicographers over the past
decades [3, 4, 10, 21] paint a very critical picture of the state of lexicographical pro-
duction in Arabic in general and of bilingual and multilingual specialized dictionaries
in particular. According to the literature, the designing of specialized dictionaries
lacks theoretical foundations and guidance on their use. Specilized dictionaries con-
tinue to be produced without asking fundamental questions about the lexicographic
process: for whom is the dictionary intended; what is the basis for the choice of data;
and how are headwords lexicographically addressed? Furthermore, the break with
Arabic lexicographical heritage and the lack of interest in ancient lexicographical
references, particularly in the natural sciences (agriculture, medicine, and chemistry),
as attested by Galfan [21] and Ben Mourad [11], do not favour the use of specialized
terminology that has been established for centuries, hence resulting in a multitude of
unstable and dubious Arabic concordances for a single specialized term.
As for the bilingual legal dictionaries, we conducted a brief review of the tools that
are available for a bilingual search in both the French-Arabic and English-Arabic lan-
guage pairs in the legal eld. We started with some of the most well-known bilingual
legal dictionaries, as presented below. None of the dictionaries have been recently
revised or consolidated in a new edition, and most of them are still only available
in print, with the exception of Al Wahab’s Law Dictionary [5] and Faruqi’s Law
Dictionary [19]. These resources have four main features that can be summarized as
follows.
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S. A. Halimi
3.1 Dictionaries Representing Lists of Terms
These dictionaries are presented in the form of glossaries or nomenclatures in which
the denition, an essential component in the constitution of a dictionary, is absent.
As de Groot and van Laer [17] note in relation to European languages, a list of legal
terms is given in the source language, and one or more words are provided in the
target language, without any information on the legal context or system. Examples
include Hakki’s Dictionnaire des termes juridiques et commerciaux [24], Moussa’s
Lexique des termes juridiques, français-arabe [35] and Belefkih’s Lexique pluridis-
ciplinaire [9].
3.2 Dictionaries with General Subject Matter
Under the entry of a legal headword, non-legally marked variants are displayed in
these dictionaries. Words from everyday language are used, for example, the expres-
sion [Taqem Shaay] “طاقم شاي” (tea service) under the entry “service”, in Chellalah’s
Dictionnaire pratique de droit-commerce-nance [16]. The dictionary includes gen-
eral words as headword entries as well, such as porter [Bawaab] (بواب), paradise
[Janna, Firdaws, Na’im] (جنة، فردوس، نعيم), and ridge [Haska] (حسكة).
This practise can also be observed in much newer legal dictionaries, such as Abi
Fadel’s Dictionnaire des termes juridiques (2004), where headword entries include
kind, gentleman, kindness, ower, detergent, etc. Similarly, under the entry ‘passage’
[2], one is presented with dierent uses of the word (passage à niveau, passage
clouté, passage d’un texte, barrer le passage, la vie est un passage, plaisir de pas-
sage, etc.). Oddly, however, the expression ‘passage à l’acte’ (to commit or act out
(an oence)), which has clear legal connotations, is absent.
3.3 Dictionaries with Various term Proposals Without Context
In these dictionaries, a selection of words is given under a headword entry with-
out specifying their semantic divergence, subject matter or legal system. In Najjar,
Badaoui and Chellalah’s Nouveau dictionnaire juridique [36], for example, under
the entry “information” (collection of evidence), one can choose from three dier-
ent proposals [Istidlaal, Isti’laam, I’laam] (استدلال، استعلام، إعلام), but each word
actually refers to a specic stage in judicial procedure. The same observation can be
made with regard to Abi Fadel’s dictionary (2004), where various correspondents that
are not legally interchangeable are presented under the entry “information” [I’laam,
Nabaa, Istidlaal, al Bahth ‘an al Dalil] (إعلام، نبأ، خبر، استدلال، البحث عن الدليل).
Conversely, the term that is used in most Arab jurisdictions to refer to the informa-
tion stage in criminal proceedings, [al Tahqiq] (التحقيق), is missing from the entry.
3.4 Dictionaries Representing Translations of Existing Dictionaries
It is likely that the use of translated dictionaries is restricted to the underlying concep-
tual organization of the original text. However, what is not clear is whether Arabic-
translated terminology is linked to any specic Arabic legal system. As a matter of
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Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and Future…
fact, in the French-to-Arabic translation of Hachette-Antoine’s Lexique des termes
juridiques [15] and Cornu’s Vocabulaire juridique [6], the proposed Arabic terms
seem to simply be a translation of the French legal system terminology. Such an
approach goes against the commonly accepted belief that laws represent cultures and
languages, and not universal referents.
As previously mentioned, the only two resources available online in a scanned
version are the long-established English-Arabic Ibrahim Al Wahab’s Law Dictionary
(1963) [5] and Faruqi’s Law Dictionary (1969/2008) [19]. Despite their recognized
authority, they have not been consolidated or revised recently. In addition to orga-
nizing terms according to branches of law, Al Wahab’s Law Dictionary [5] presents
important phrases in Arabic that are useful for drafting. Latin and ancient legal terms
are also included. Although a word may have multiple meanings, no denition or
encyclopaedic information is provided. As for Faruqi’s Law Dictionary [19], under
each entry, an extensive denition is provided in Arabic with information on the term,
relevant branch of law and legal system (English, Scottish, or American), along with
useful phraseology. However, the dictionary covers a wide variety of elds, includ-
ing forensic medicine, commerce, banking, insurance, civil aviation, diplomacy, and
petroleum, making it less exhaustive in terms of law. Other print dictionaries con-
sulted in the context of this study share the same features listed above. To get a
comprehensive picture of all types of bilingual legal resources, an examination of
accessible online tools seems unavoidable.
4 Review of Online Resources for Arabic Legal Translation
With the expansion of Arabic language use on the internet, we can observe the pro-
liferation of all sorts of bilingual legal resources destined for translators. Many of
them are the result of individual initiatives in the form of glossaries whose validity
cannot be conrmed. Institutional databases, which are mainly compiled by interna-
tional organizations, are gradually providing open access to their term bases and o-
cial translated documents. Concomitantly, the development of large parallel corpora
related to computer-assisted translation tools and Machine Translation (MT) systems,
such as Glosbe or Reverso, are replacing traditional terminological databases, as they
provide solutions with peripheral phraseology. With Glosbe, the user can even look at
the metadata. Other online tools, such as KudoZ and the Proz.com discussion forum,
are not suciently well-developed in Arabic to serve as an eective source for ter-
minology searches.
Dictionaries and glossaries. A simple search of online legal Arabic dictionaries
leads to either book libraries or platforms directing users to institutional terminologi-
cal bases (ex. UNTERM) or compilations of terms that are labeled as dictionaries.
Browsing through the pages of platforms (ex. Lexicool directory) reveals that most
legal bilingual and multilingual resources with Arabic are limited to glossaries with-
out denitions or legal system-based information. Evidently, the relevance of such
individual contributions cannot be veried and their authority can be put into ques-
tion. For copyright reasons, Arabic dictionaries in the legal domain are not available
on the web, as is the case for dictionaries in general. The scarcity of legal e-diction-
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S. A. Halimi
aries extends to all languages in general, since legal dictionaries “tend to be owned
by legal publishers, thus, not accessible and sometimes published in obsolete and
proprietary formats.” [38: 170].
Terminological databases. Institutionally constructed resources, such as
UNTERM, ILOTERM, FMI, WIPO, and OIT1 are increasingly available online.
They are being improved to include relevant information on a term’s use, thereby
helping to solve translation problems. However, their terminology is bound by occur-
rences in in-house documents, limiting term coverage to the accepted practices of
international institutions. Search results do not refer to other concepts used under
national legislations. The UN term base (UNTERM), which is considered to be a
resource with high quality control, still has undesirable features due to in-house-
centred information that is barely able to support the expanding use of contextual
bases. A quick search in the UNTERM or ocial document system (ODS)2 reveals
two main features. Firstly, that it is highly UN-system oriented, thereby restricting its
applicability for translation situations (see example below), since it does not provide
all the information required to meet translation needs for all legal situations of com-
munication. Secondly, that it is less aware of national-system variations, thus creat-
ing uncertainties with regard to term applicability (see example below), as existing
variants are not covered.
Parallel corpora. Because it contains full-text digital UN documents from the
Security Council and General Assembly for administrative purposes, the online o-
cial document system (ODS) is a source of extensive, revised parallel corpora. This
institutional e-resource is very useful for international legal document translation
in particular. However, using the platform as a legal translation source proves to
be time-consuming, as it does not oer the possibility of displaying the dierent
language versions of a document in parallel, which would allow for a quick search.
Other e-resources that are equally as helpful for legal translators are contextual search
platforms that support the Arabic language, such as Glosbe and Reverso
3Although they are not exclusively law-oriented per se, they provide several trans-
lation proposals using free dictionaries and translation memories with in-context
translations. Being able to carry out a contextual search is clearly of interest for trans-
lators, thanks to the number of translated sentences and phrases that are proposed,
which highlight the term within its phraseological environment and provide the refer-
ence of the source document. However, many translated occurrences are deemed to
be irrelevant and their authority can be put into question.
Although parallel corpora provide a handy search feature, the issue of term choice
acceptability is yet to be resolved, as search results do not necessarily produce rel-
evant counterparts related to the legal system or branch of law. Contextual search
engines still lack accuracy and relevancy when it comes to context-related use and
translation advice. For translation into Arabic, many term queries in English or
French that are submitted to contextual searches result in terminological variabil-
ity. This variation may derive not only from non-overlapping conceptual systems or
1 There are large institutional corpora that do not include Arabic, such as IATE and WTOTERM.
2 Search in UNTERM and ODS (consulted 12-05-2023).
3 The platform Linguee does not include the Arabic language.
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Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and Future…
cases of isomorphism, but also dierences in lexical uses in terms (ex. legal bodies,
titles, judicial structures) within the same language [25]. Indeed, one of the major
challenges encountered by legal translators arises from international institutional
documents that refer to both the rules and provisions of national legislation and inter-
national instruments, principles and standards that do not depend on a single norma-
tive space, or documents that put two dierent systems in contact.
The concept of ‘assignment of receivables’, cession de créance, [Hawalat al Haq]
(حوالة الحق) or [Ihalat al Mustahaqaat] (إحالة المستحقات), neatly illustrates this point.
It is a complex concept that needs to be carefully handled when translating into Ara-
bic, as the concept is subject to dierent interpretations by the four schools of thought
in Islamic jurisprudence. In regulating the provisions of transfers (Hawala) (حوالة)
in Arabic-speaking countries, the ‘Assignment of the Right’ (Hawala al Haq) (حوالة
الحق) refers to the transfer of debt in the eld of assignment of rights in most civil
laws, thus eliminating many rights by considering them to be non-assignable rights
in accordance with the ruling principles and provisions of Islamic jurisprudence [31].
A search for the term ‘assignment of receivables’ or cession de créance in Arabic
in UN documents and the term base directs users to the internationally established
term [Ihalat al Mustahaqaat](إحالة المستحقات), principally referring to the United
Nations Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade [50].
Similarly, matching segments in the open platforms Glosbe and Reverso4 propose
the internationally used term [Ihalat al Mustahaqaat], unaware of the relevant term
used in national laws, which is [Hawalat al Haq] (حوالة الحق). This detracts from
the proper use of terminology, as information is limited to what is provided by the
UN term database or the contextual search platforms, [Ihalat al Mustahaqaat] (إحالة
المستحقات) even though the internationally accepted term is not well-adapted for all
translation situations. Drawing attention to the use of dierent terminology in national
or regional institutions is therefore critical to solving issues of legal terminology.
Important concepts in the laws of international trade and secured transactions are
designated dierently in the terminology of the United Nations Commission on Inter-
national Trade Law (UNCITRAL), where the choice of vocabulary is inuenced by a
desire to infuse international discourse with metalanguage that strives for a universal-
ity of concepts [51]. Metalanguage criteria can therefore be dened by two cumula-
tive elements: the coordination of language choices and the acceptance of common
concepts as a consequence of the latter coordination [51]. This tendency towards
uniformization of international trade concepts gives rise to confusion in Arabic ter-
minology use if relevant encyclopaedic information is absent.
The aim in international commerce drafting is to develop an autonomous terminol-
ogy to avoid term confusion between internationally agreed concepts and national
system-based concepts. However, by referring to only internationally accepted terms,
relevant terms that are best known to translators end up being excluded. Legal knowl-
edge that is crucial for an appropriate translation is therefore overlooked. In order
for a translation to fulll its purpose, access to contextual information should not be
avoided for the sake of institutional term uniformity.
4 Search on Reverso and Glosbe (consulted 12-05-2023).
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S. A. Halimi
Against this background, UN agencies have carried out extensive work to cap-
ture institutional data for machine translation and terminology search in working
languages, including Arabic. Firstly, an institutional MT tool based on statistics and
trained data, the Translation Assistant for Patent Titles and Abstracts (TAPTA) [40],
was successfully developed. It is dependent on the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy
(BLEU) system for post-editing. The system has been expanded to cover 10 pairs of
languages in a cloud-based SMT service. Thanks to its integration with the UN’s in-
house computer-assisted translation tool eLUNa, the tool is now considered a critical
global element in the UN translation toolkit [53]. Both systems’ data are trained on
large and extensive in-house parallel corpora. Their results are therefore limited to
in-house data, and, by extension, the UN context. However, if they were open-access
sources, they would still be of great use in legal translation, thanks to the authority
of the UN language services as a source of expert information. These MT systems,
combined with in-house CAT tools, are institutional and not open to public use. Aside
from UN sta, the eLuna interface currently cannot benet other users. That being
said, this technology solution still presents disadvantages with regard to the relevance
of translation choices, as it only provides parallel segments of texts as translation pro-
posals. There is still a proportion of irrelevant results that show non-contextualized
translation choices: no indication is given on national or regional uses, nor is any
translation advice provided. Technology-based solutions need then higher level of
semantic knowledge and conceptualization for a better understanding of legal docu-
ments. Expert knowledge bases such as bilingual ontologies can facilitate legal con-
cept understanding and terminology management in the source and target languages.
5 Ontology as a Bilingual Legal Resource
Major technological breakthroughs in articial intelligence, knowledge represen-
tation, and computer-assisted technologies have helped develop expert knowledge
bases. The last decade has seen rapid growth in the interest of researchers in devel-
oping specialized ontologies that oer conceptual information with categories of
concepts and terms, as building ontologies is now considered a crucial part of the
semantic web endeavor [7]. In the eld of law, ontologies have been widely used
by practitioners and scholars, as well as laypeople in varied situations, for example,
when simulating legal actions, semantic search and indexing, and maintaining laws
and regulations up-to-date [18].
In translation, not much attention has been given to developing bilingual legal
ontologies for translation problem solving. A decade ago, this same analysis was
put forward in a study by Orozco and Gijón [37], who armed that “whilst legal
ontologies would appear to have tremendous potential in the future, those available
at present oer limited information of the kind that is of use” (37: 29). Since then,
the use of ontologies has been preceded by an interest in parallel corpora as training
data for statistical machine translation. Building ontologies in the legal eld is not
geared toward translation tasks. While initial European projects related to laws have
led to various projects mapping out the laws of European Union member states, such
as JurWordNet [23], LRI-Core [13], DALOS project [20], and LYNX project [32],
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Bilingual Legal Resources for Arabic: State of Aairs and Future…
they are not destined for translators and hence do not provide sucient comparative
information. They are meant to harmonize European laws and compare legislation
in dierent languages to detect incompatibilities, dierences, or similarities between
legislations [23].
5.1 Arabic Ontologies
There has been little research on ontologies in Arabic. Thus far, developing ontolo-
gies from Arabic text is considered a dicult process due to the lack of machine-read-
able resources and the complexity of the grammatical, morphological, and semantic
aspects of the Arabic language [7]. Nevertheless, some Arabic ontologies have been
recently developed in specic elds, such as infectious disease [7], word synonymy
[28], national criminal law [12], and news [1]. In the legal eld, building an ontology
would require taking into consideration the specicities of the Arabic language in
combination with variations in legal traditions in Arabic-speaking countries. Formal-
izing Arabic legal knowledge would consist of formally representing similarities and
dierences at the concept and term levels of Arabic legal systems. Similarly, building
a bilingual ontology implies establishing correspondences and identifying similari-
ties and dierences at the concept and term levels in the two languages. Incompat-
ibilities are thus highlighted and can then be addressed by proposing contextualized
counterparts. Recent research on Arabic ontologies, which we have not been able
to access, does not cover bilingual legal ontologies involving Arabic and a second
language.
A domain-specic legal ontology for translation purposes implies that the knowl-
edge base will provide a comparison of concept categories and descriptions of con-
cept features, thereby enabling the translator to make choices that are relevant to a
specic communicative situation by semantically disambiguating terms through spe-
cic insights that are contextually grounded and can be applied to particular settings.
This approach is not only important when the target text has to achieve legal status
in the target law and acquire a legal eect identical to that of the source text, but also
when the translated text does not belong to the same legal system as the original text.
The translated text gains clarity and consistency by describing legal concepts with
system-specic referents. As for the international institutional context, in addition to
formalising legal knowledge, building ontologies with Arabic enables the detection
of Arabic term variations that are not the result of legal system decisions, but inef-
fective term choice.
6 Concluding Remarks
The shortcomings noted in print bilingual dictionaries with Arabic provide momen-
tum towards a more comprehensive approach to knowledge representation, includ-
ing technology-based and contextually sensitive resources. As might be reasonably
expected, legal resources compiled within the framework of well-resourced lan-
guages could benet substantially by developing knowledge or lexicographical tools
in less-represented languages.
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S. A. Halimi
There is a real terminological heterogeneity in Arabic legal dictionaries, glossa-
ries, terminological bases and institutional websites, which evidently compromises
the reliability of the information that is presented.
With the expansion of online content, benchmark resources with a high degree of
accuracy and completeness are needed to ensure that information undergoes quality
control for interoperability. A shift towards formalizing Arabic legal knowledge will
ll existing gaps when it comes to representing legal content and retrieving infor-
mation, thereby providing legal translators with a tool that contains details allow-
ing translators to make informed and relevant choices, in addition to opening new
research perspectives for Arabic legal translation. Bilingual ontologies that include
Arabic for translation purposes would provide a comparative view of legal systems
in two languages so that relevant terminological choices can be identied and a
shared understanding of knowledge can be established in a particular legal domain
of interest. In addition, well-constructed ontologies would help resolve issues of het-
erogeneity, discrepancy and confusion when applying various system-based Arabic
terminologies.
Funding Open access funding provided by University of Geneva.
Open access funding provided by University of Geneva
Declarations
Statements and Declarations The author has no relevant nancial or non-nancial interests to disclose.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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