The article discusses terminology mining on a small scale as used by legal freelance translators in practice, and recent developments in this area. Major properties of legal terms are discussed from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective where terms are seen as prompts that activate background knowledge structures. Next various resources are presented, including the most traditional ones, i.e. dictionaries, to more recent online and electronic resources such as googling, and discussion forums. Their major advantage is reduction of search time, increased functionality of translation and insight into how other translators have tackled a similar terminological problem before (established equivalents).It is generally acknowledged that finding suitable equivalents of legal terms is a source of constant and time-consuming problems faced by legal translators in their practice (cf. e.g. Pieńkos 1994: 304, Cao 2007: 53). Arntz and Picht's study estimates that in general terminology mining takes up to 75 per cent of translation time 1 (qtd. in Austermühl 2001: 102). Most translators work to tight deadlines under substantial time pressure and in reality have little time to carry out in-depth comparative-law analyses. It is vital for them to retrieve accurate equivalents as quickly as possible and recent technological developments have substantially accelerated the process. In this paper an attempt will be made to examine the ways in which translators search for equivalents of legal terms and how they have evolved in the last decade. The ultimate goal is to investigate how new tools improve translation quality and what they reveal about the nature of terminological problems.
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