CHAPTER EIGHT
TOWARDS A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
ACCOUNT OF A TERMINOLOGICAL DATABASE:
THE CASE OF LEGAL LANGUAGE
EDYTA WIĉCàAWSKA
Introduction
Effective terminology management is said to make up an important part of
the translator’s macro-competence and thus it determines the quality of the
end product (Biel 2012, Prieto Ramos 2011). This seems to be especially
true in reference to the translation of legal texts. Here the current demands
of the economic market related to the fast pace of translation services and
the growing complexity of the legal texts to be translated have made most
of the traditional, lexicographic reference resources unreliable (e.g. de
Groot 2012: 545, Chromá 2012: 108-138). The legal trade in Poland
comprises an ever wider scope of areas and communication in the field of
law is becoming more intricate, which creates the need for easily
accessible, domain relevant terminological tools. As a consequence, most
traditional dictionaries do not meet the translator’s expectations, in respect
of both the contents and form. In the new economic and market-related
circumstances there is a growing need for terminographic tools^1 which –
on the level of microstructure – would provide context-related data
accounting for the systemic intricacies of legal language (Kjœr 2007) and
(^1) Though aware of the distinction between the terms terminography and
lexicography, as discussed in lexicographic theory (e.g. Bergenholtz, Tarp 1995,
Humbley 1997: 13-31) the author uses these terms interchangeably. Whenever the
term lexicography alone appears it is either used in the sense of specialised
lexicography dealing with the compilation of terminological dictionaries or in
reference to the macro- and microstructural principles of lexicography on which