Le dictionnaire historique arabe au service de la traduction juridique français – arabe
Authors: Mabrak Sami 
Published: September 2023

The Arabic Historical Dictionary at the service of French - Arabic legal translation

Legal translation plays an important role today, especially in the context of open globalisation and intensive immigration. Translators working in the legal field increasingly require the deployment of translation tools that guarantee maximum scientific accuracy and transparency, such as dictionaries in general and legal dictionaries in particular. Through the compilation and publication of historical dictionaries, the legal translator will have access not only to the description of the language as it is used today, but also to the semantic and morphological evolution of its lexicon. Historical dictionaries are also a very important source for the cultural, social, economic, scientific and civilisational aspects of the use of the language in question in societies. Thus, lexicographers today are moving towards outsourcing the scientific tasks of compiling and deploying historical dictionaries in the various fields of human activity. Consequently, after being considered as end products for several decades, historical dictionaries are nowadays reusable and exploitable tools in many fields, such as the legal field, as our article shows. The present study analyses the added value of the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language (DHLA) to French-Arabic legal translation. To do so, we applied an analytical and comparative method. We have constituted a corpus from terms related to civil status; more specifically in the field of marriage and divorce. In addition, we have used three other bilingual dictionaries of specialised language in the legal field in this study, namely The French - Arabic Legal Dictionary, Lexique des termes juridiques and Vocabulaire juridique. Thus, since our work focuses on French - Arabic legal translation, we used the online translator "Reverso" as a means of comparing the translation of civil status terms from French into Arabic. After analysing and comparing the definition and usage of these terms with their Arabic translation, we found that the French terms and their Arabic translation still do not refer to the same concepts and usages. We were able to explain this finding by the fact that the French civil status code reflects a Western culture and tradition expressed in French that is different and divergent from that expressed in Arabic via the civil status code in the Arab world. Moreover, by referring to the definitions of the Arabic translation of these terms, the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language reveals numerous elements of terminological and semantic divergence between the French terms and their Arabic translation. These elements of divergence, particularly on the semantic level, could lead to situations of injustice for the people concerned by the translation. Following this observation, the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language constitutes an indispensable tool to revise the current Arabic translation of French legal terms; to propose new lexies as translations for more terminological precision, more semantic clarity, consequently more fidelity and transparency in the field of translation of legal texts, and finally more justice in the application of these texts. Finally, the study also highlighted the possibility of exploiting the corpora of the French and Arabic historical dictionaries through the design of IT solutions ensuring interoperability between the lexicographical data of the two historical dictionaries. The online version of the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic.