The Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law Online (Simplified Chinese – English, French)

The Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law (Chinese-English, French), developed by the Ricci Association since 2006, is the very first trilingual dictionary on Chinese law. The dictionary includes approximately 24,000 legal terms in Chinese (legal terms per se as well as terms which are often used in a legal context), as well as English and French translations of these terms. A team of around 40 French, Chinese and English-speaking lawyers, scholars, law students and proofreaders contributed to the dictionary under the supervision and guidance of the Ricci Association.

For more information: Brill.com

Contents
Background
Appendices
  • 23.765 entries.

The Ricci Association is a non-profit association, responsible for promoting and developing the Grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise, Chinois-Français (or Grand Ricci), the most comprehensive dictionary between Chinese and a western language, first published in 2001 in print format (6 volumes) and then released as a numerical version, available on Brill’s China Reference Shelf and on Pleco Software Incorporated. The Ricci Association works on the enrichment of the Grand Ricci database through thematic dictionaries. In this context, the association launched in 2006 the project of preparing the Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law – Chinese-English, French, encompassing around 24,000 Chinese legal terms translated into French and English.

The editors have tried to establish a first set of data by gathering terms and translations from existing dictionaries. The main dictionaries that have been used for this purpose were the following:

  • Grand Ricci (Chinese-French).
  • Hanying Faxue Cidian (Chinese-English), Law Press.
  • Hanying Da Cidian (Chinese-English), Shanghai Jiaotong Daxue Press.
  • A Political and Legal Dictionary (Chinese-English), published in 1981 in the US by Mr. Bilancia.
  • WTO Law Dictionary (Chinese-English).
Then the editors worked on reviewing and augmenting this first set of data by:
  • adding terms extracted from Chinese laws and regulations or from Chinese legal manuals (for instance, systematic extraction of legal terms from PRC laws and regulations on corporate, civil or labour matters);
  • checking the relevance and existence of each term, its transcription, translation (in English and in French);
  • checking the number of occurrences and the relevance of each Chinese term using Google or Baidu search engines;
  • checking the consistency of the French and English translations;
  • deleting irrelevant terms or terms that were not in wide use;
  • patching "gaps";
  • relating terms to each other (synonyms, abbreviations);
  • adding explanations;
  • adding other terms.