Legal translation enables effective communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries while safeguarding legal rights. As a result, bilingual legal dictionaries are considered essential tools for ensuring accuracy and consistency in legal translations. The Vice Presidency's Law Dictionary (2002) is one such resource endorsed by the Iranian Judiciary for certified translators. This study evaluates the dictionary's provided legal equivalents using Hatim and Mason's (1990, 1997) translation model, which accounts for factors such as (non)standard dialects, intertextuality, and communicative function. To this end, the English equivalents of 400 Persian legal terms across different legal domains were analyzed. The research also investigates the relationship between the acceptability and accuracy of the English equivalents and how these levels of acceptability and accuracy vary across distinct legal domains. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how legal dictionaries function as authoritative translation tools and how their prescribed equivalents align with broader translation quality criteria, offering insights into improving legal terminology standardization, bilingual dictionary design, and legal translation pedagogy. This research is particularly relevant to legal translators, lexicographers, and scholars concerned with legal lexicography, terminology standardization, and the broader dynamics of translation within judicial systems, offering a foundation for future advancements in the field.
Omidi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.