McGraw-Hill's Spanish and English Legal Dictionary : Diccionario Juridico Ingles-Espanol

This dictionary is well written and comprehensive. An excellent resource for judicial spanish/english translators.

Of the numerous SpanishEnglish legal dictionaries I use regularly, this is consistently the one least likely to include the terms I need. I suspect it's partly because this is an abridged edition, and partly because the sources that the author(s) cite include very few publications that are even remotely recent. Another problem: the entries generally provide narrative explanations rather than functionally equivalent terms. The explanations are cogent, clear, interesting, and often establish differences in meaning between different countries. However, this approach is not helpful if you're a translator trying to figure out the best English-language equivalent for a Spanish legal term or vice versa.

As a US immigration lawyer, I was pretty disappointed with this dictionary. It had few of the terms I looked for.

I am a translator and also and interpreter, and I have found that this is a great dictionary for my translations, althought I must say, that sometimes the explanations can be somewhat confusing, but I still think that is a very good dictionary in general. Just one thing.. I think the authors did miss a few words.

I am a prosecutor, and I needed a dictionary to help translate the basic legal terms that are necessary to explain a guilty plea to criminal defendants. For my purposes the dictionary has been helpful. The dictionary enables me to find some word that will be close enough to my intended meaning to enable the defendant to follow. It is a handsome hard cover volume.

However, it doesn't have the kind of detail that you might want to explain to clients of different cultural backgrounds the more subtle differences between legal expressions. As one somewhat trivial example that comes to mind, we use the word audiencia for hearing. This dictionary also has the word vista for hearing, but it gives no insight into the difference between the two words -- when you would want to use one rather than the other. So, I just use audiencia because that's what our local translators use, and I trust them.

For simple translations, this dictionary is a great value, and I am very happy to have it. I am not skilled enough in spanish to be able to explain subtle differences in meaning -- or for that matter to write a review in spanish, so I don't find the lack of detail to be a problem. If you want detail, you won't find it here.