1. Per Döhler’s indispensable guide to VAT for translators in Germany has been updated. Umsatzsteuerleitfaden at www.triacom.com – click on Mehr, Dokumente – first in the list. The Triacom website has been updated too.
2. uepo.de reports on the publication of Handbook of Terminology (John Benjamins), online and in print. I’m not sure what it costs and I haven’t got time to read it, but I am interested in the article by Janine Pimentel, who studied in Portugal and teachers in Brazil: ‘Using frame semantics to build a bilingual lexical resource on legal terminology‘. I haven’t got into this any further, but Janine Pimentel’s website has more information, including a link to a Portuguese-English database using semantic frameworks:
The JuriDiCo is a database that describes the legal terminology that can be found in a comparable corpus of judgments produced by the Supreme Court of Canada and by Supremo Tribunal de Justiça de Portugal. The database was elaborated according to the theoretical and methodological principles of FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) and is also partly based on the methodology for compiling specialized dictionaries developed in DiCoInfo (L’Homme 2008). Some minor modifications were made in the DiCoInfo’s database, namely the insertion of a field called frames. For thetime being, JuriDiCo only includes specialized verbs, which were extracted by means of TermoStat (Drouin 2003) and subsequently validated. 200 English and Portuguese terms entries are currently available online as well as about 40 frames that group together not only equivalent terms but also semantically related terms within each language. JuriDiCo allows users to search terms, equivalent terms and frames.
Via the website of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and academia.edu, some of her publications can be accessed (log in with Facebook or Google). I don’t know my linguistics so I haven’t read about semantic frames before, but in Juridico they seem to be contexts. If you read the articles you will know more than I do.
3. Carl Gardner has published, for Kindle, What a Fix-Up!. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (the ‘-term’ in the Act seems not to be capitaliized). As he writes, ‘the prospect of a hung Parliament after the 2015 general election has dramatically raised the Act’s profile’.
Listening to Carl Gardner and other lawyers on podcasts was one of the great innovations of internet communication for me – to hear serious yet chatty discussions of UK law and politics. There are links to many Without Prejudice podcasts on Carl Gardner’s blog Head of Legal.
4. Unreliable Evidence – BBC radio programmes with Clive Anderson.