Překladové právnické slovníky: budou brzy minulostí?

The role of bilingual and multilingual legal dictionaries in translation and legal communication is changing as the availability of various online resources increases. It turns out that most legal dictionaries published in the EU do not meet the standards of an ideal legal dictionary, in which linguistic data are supplemented with relevant law-related information. Furthermore, there is a strong disparity in terms of availability between dictionaries of major European languages and those of languages of limited diffusion. In the Czech context, bibliographic data indicate that a massive wave of legal lexicographic activity culminated around the year 2000. Since then, the trend has been dropping sharply. The authorship of the dictionaries, among which major European languages and Latin predominate, is almost exclusively in the hands of Czech authors. The decline of paper dictionaries does not seem to be fully compensated by online dictionaries for the time being. Yet the potential of electronic platforms for legal lexicography is considerable in terms of capacity, userfriendliness, accessibility and sustainability.