As a fan of all things Swiss, I was excited to learn of the recent publication of Tom West’s Trilingual Swiss Law Dictionary. That link will take you to a review on the ATA French Language Division website, and this link will take you to the book’s Amazon page.
Tom is an attorney, former ATA President, and eminent authority on legal translation in a multitude of languages. If you translate between Swiss French/German and US English, this dictionary looks like a must-have resource. Switzerland does maintain an official terminology database: TERMDAT, but this dictionary goes well beyond what’s there–offering updated terminology, and including many terms for which TERMDAT doesn’t provide an official translation. The dictionary is laid out in a very user-friendly three-column format, and includes helpful explanations of the US English terms, especially for words that do not have an exact US English equivalent, i.e. “juge unique/Einzelrichter/single judge (as opposed to a panel of judges).”
Tom West’s previous publication, the Spanish-English Dictionary of Law and Business, is now in its second edition and is considered the go-to reference for that topic. I think that this new Swiss law dictionary is sure to be just as valuable a resource for legal translators!
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