The shortage of legal dictionaries translating European languages

This article is intended to shed light on the availability and distribution of legal dictionaries that translate European languages. The premise of this article is that the enlargement of the European Union has increased the shortage of bilingual dictionaries. To verify this premise, statistics have been applied to a representative corpus which consists of 159 bilingual law dictionaries with terms from two or more legal languages used in the EU. This rather unique approach of applying statistics to a complete corpus shows that only 15% of the needed dictionaries really exist. This is a very small percentage. In particular, dictionaries for the legal languages of the new Member States are not sufficiently available. Compared to the fifteen old Member States, the ten new Member States possess a lesser number of relevant dictionaries. As long as bilingual dictionaries do not offer direct links between all legal languages, German, rather than French, has to be considered as a relay language on an equal footing with English.