A Corpus-Based Mechanism of Developing English-Urdu Legal Glossary

Abstract

The most creative and educational reference materials for professionals in a specific area, both within and across cultures, are dictionaries as they facilitate understanding the basic vocabulary of that field. This paper addresses the complete process of creating a bilingual English-Urdu vocabulary of law. It includes all phases of the compilation process including planning, terms extraction, parallel corpus construction, and review. A parallel corpus comprising English-Urdu translation is used in this research. The corpus is imported into SDL Trados where concordance searches help identify suitable target language equivalents for each term. It also demonstrates many difficulties the glossary's writers have while dealing with a large quantity of material and offers sensible solutions for creating a useful output for the readers. The research suggests focusing the efforts on the field of lexicography largely on creating bilingual dictionaries that are both general and specialized, employing an appropriate approach that effectively addresses the demands of the target readers. The study is restricted to addressing the creation of the English-Urdu legal lexicon. Comparative studies can be carried out to explore their function as valuable resources for various professions across cultural boundaries.