Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 13 • June 2005
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Longman Słownik Współczesny Angielsko-Polski,
Polsko-Angielski: The First Active Bilingual
Dictionary for Polish Learners of English
Jacek Fisiak, Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak, Mariusz Idzikowski,
Ewelina Jagła, Michał Jankowski, Robert Lew. 1039 pages ISBN 0 582 447755 Pearson Education, Harlow 2004 The following is a
brief characterisation of Longman
Słownik Współczesny angielsko-polski, polsko-angielski (LSW).1
After giving some general information about the dictionary,
I shall focus on those features which make it the first active dictionary of
the bilingual type on the Polish scene. LSW is aimed at Polish learners of English. Its primary target
audience are gymnasium (junior
high) and liceum (high school)
students, i.e., people in the 13-19 age group, with command of English
ranging from beginner to upper-intermediate. This does not mean the
dictionary has nothing to offer to older or more advanced learners. On the
contrary, the quality of the translations (which can only be appreciated when
compared – by speakers fluent in both languages – with those in other local
bilingual dictionaries) and the wealth of usage information (on which more
below) make it a suitable tool also for more ambitious language tasks,
especially of the encoding type. The dictionary is
corpus-based. For English, it relies on the Longman Spoken and Written
English Corpus; for Polish, a 10-million word corpus (90 per cent written, 10
per cent spoken) was gathered specially for this project.2 The
written part of the corpus consists of fiction (mostly for teenagers),
fragments of textbooks in various school subjects, and newspaper and magazine
articles. For the spoken part, everyday conversations were recorded (with the
participants' permission) and subsequently transcribed. In numerical terms,
the scope of LSW is as follows:3
It should be noted
that there are quite a few English-Polish/Polish-English dictionaries of
comparable (physical) size. Many of them contain, or claim to contain,
substantially more entries. However, these are all dictionaries with
virtually no depth, where a typical entry consists of one sense with a single
equivalent, or sometimes several equivalents with no indication of the
differences between them. None of them is based on a Polish corpus. By
contrast, the entries in LSW, especially those for high-frequency items, are
more elaborate, with clear discrimination of senses and equivalents, rich
collocational information, and carefully chosen, corpus-derived example
sentences. The English wordlist
of LSW is largely co-extensive with that of the fourth edition of the Longman Active Study Dictionary, the
main additions being recent neologisms (e.g., text message as both noun and verb) and a host of geographical names.
The main source for the Polish word list was the Polish corpus, checked
against the reversal of the English-Polish side and occasionally supplemented
by material drawn from the most recent monolingual dictionaries of Polish. Although the
English-Polish side started out as a bilingualisation of LASDE4, the result
is not a semi-bilingual dictionary like, e.g., the Polish version of Oxford Wordpower (OW) – a publication similar in size
and reasonably popular with Polish students.4 In the case of LSW,
English definitions have been removed and whole entries reorganised (through
splitting and merging of senses), so that what we get is a new bilingual
dictionary, with precise contextual equivalents of the different senses of
the headwords rather than just broad translational hints typically found in
semi-bilingual dictionaries. All illustrative
examples in LSW are English ones. This means that, contrary to expectations,
the examples in the Polish-English part are in the dictionary’s target
language: English, not Polish. The rationale for that is quite simple. LSW is
a directional dictionary, in particular, it is
explicitly addressed to Polish learners of English, not to native speakers of
both languages. It can reasonably be assumed that Poles do not need to be
told how Polish words are used, or at least, that it is not the kind of
information for which they need a dictionary of English. It thus seemed to
make more sense to provide them with English sentences and sentence fragments
illustrating the various translations of the individual senses of Polish
headwords. This facilitates the retention of new items by repeated exposure;
at the same time, the user is given immediate confirmation that the English
equivalent that they are offered really works in a particular context. Most
importantly, learners can use the examples as models for their own production
in English. The presence of L2 examples in the L1-L2 part of the dictionary
eliminates the need to go to the L2-L1 part, or to consult a monolingual
dictionary of L2, each time the learner wants to use a newly found L2 item in
their linguistic production. Thus, the main criticism levelled against
traditional bilingual dictionaries, i.e., that they offer little or no help
in encoding, does not apply to LSW. Like the examples in
the English-Polish part, those in the Polish-English part also come from the
Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus and from the Internet. This being
the case, one might wonder what the role of the Polish corpus was in the
project. For one thing, it served as a basis for extracting the Polish word
list, proving to be an especially rich source of collocations and other fixed
expressions, often too recent or too colloquial (but nonetheless frequent,
especially among young people) to feature in the traditionally conservative
monolingual dictionaries of Polish. The Polish corpus was also critical in
deciding upon sense discrimination and the ordering of senses within entries.
Finally, better English equivalents could be provided thanks to the large
number of collocates found in the Polish corpus: by comparing groups of
collocations across the two languages it was possible to fine-tune the
translations. As a rule, the
English examples are not translated into Polish, except in cases where a structural
difference between the two languages makes word-for-word translation
impossible, thus posing too big a challenge for the user. Even then, it is
normally only the difficult fragment itself, and not the whole sentence, that
is translated. The reader might wonder what difficult means here, or rather: difficult for whom? Since the
target audience of LSW encompasses learners of different proficiency levels,
attempts were made to exercise some control over the complexity of examples.
In particular, whenever the corpus afforded a choice, the simplest possible
sentences were opted for as illustrations of basic senses of common words,
the assumption being that the entries or entry fragments in question would be
of interest primarily to beginners. If no simple example was available,
rather than making one up, we took an authentic sentence from the corpus
(sometimes shortening it) and provided a translation in brackets. The practice of leaving most examples untranslated
is one of the features distinguishing LSW from another bilingual Longman
publication, the Longman Dicionário
Escolar inglês-português, português-inglês (LDE). That dictionary gives
English examples in the English-Portuguese part, Portuguese examples in the
Portuguese-English part, and translates all of them. The example sentences,
which come from corpora of English and Brazilian Portuguese (Harmer 2002:
iv), appear to have been considerably simplified. The most likely reason is
that LDE seems to be aimed primarily at beginner and pre-intermediate
Brazilian learners of English, a feature which is also reflected in the
dictionary's coverage.5 LSW has a number of
extra features which are meant to assist in language learning and at the same
time increase the book's attractiveness. An insert in the middle contains a
section on life in the Interspersed among
entries in the main body of the dictionary are a few dozen grammar boxes
(e.g. on the English articles, individual modal verbs or irregular plurals)
and well over six hundred usage notes. The latter focus on important lexical
and grammatical differences between English and Polish, on meaning and
register differences between similar and/or frequently confused English
items, as well as on instances where no exact equivalent exists in the target
language for a given source language item. In general, the idea was to highlight
points of special difficulty for the Polish learner. The authors of LSW have
all at some point taught English to Poles. Being native speakers of Polish,
we have also learnt English as a foreign language ourselves – and are still
learning it. Thanks to this insider's perspective, we hope to have come up
with notes that are of more relevance to Polish learners of English than the
one-size-fits-all usage advice dispensed by monolingual dictionaries. LSW is the second
Longman dictionary produced by a team of lexicographers at the To those familiar with recent developments in the
area of bilingual pedagogical lexicography, the dictionary presented here may
not appear particularly revolutionary or even innovative.6 However, in the Polish context it is a huge step
forward. We are confident that LSW will serve its users well. One
prerequisite for that is that Polish teachers of English must forget what
they themselves have been taught, namely, that all bilingual dictionaries are
merely poor relations of monolingual ones. The reactions we have had so far,
from teachers and students alike, are encouraging. We would like nothing
better than for our dictionary to set a standard aimed at by any new arrival
on the Polish dictionary scene which aspires to be taken seriously. Notes 1. I am grateful to Mariusz Idzikowski, Ilan Kernerman
and Robert Lew for commenting on drafts of this paper. 2.
The
corpus is the property of Pearson Education Ltd. 3.
The apparent discrepancy in the
number of headwords and fixed expressions between the two sides is a result, mainly,
of the treatment of Polish noun+adjective compounds of the type stacja benzynowa "petrol
station". Such compounds are nested in the entries for their headnouns
(and included in the above count as fixed expressions), whereas English
compounds head separate entries. All run-ons (deadjectival adverbs, deverbal
nouns, etc) are accompanied by their L2 equivalents. All English phrasal
verbs and most Polish reflexive verbs (except those with no corresponding
non-reflexive form) are nested within entries for the respective main verbs.
If we count run-ons and phrasal/reflexive verbs, the actual number of entries
is closer to 24,000 (E-P) and 21,000 (P-E). 4.
The
first semi-bilingual work of reference in the English-Polish context was
the Kernerman dictionary of 1990, followed by its 1996 and 2002
reincarnations (see EDSP, EPLD and PS in the References). The later arrival,
OW (1997, 2002), has since dominated the semi-bilingual dictionary scene in 5. These remarks are not meant as an exhaustive
comparison of the two dictionaries, but merely as a brief indication of the
differences in their design and execution. This may give a better idea of LSW
to readers who are familiar with LDE. 6.
See,
e.g., Back (2004) or other papers in the Bilingual
Lexicography section of Williams and Vessier (eds.) 2004. References Dictionaries English Dictionary for Speakers of Polish. 1990. English-Polish Learner's Dictionary. 1996. Warszawa:
Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN and Password Publishers. (EPLD; a revised and updated
version of EDSP) Longman Active Study
Dictionary. 2000. 4th ed. Longman Dicionário
Escolar inglês-português, português-inglês (para estudiantes brasileiros). 2002. Harlow:
Pearson Education Limited. (LDE) Longman Podręczny
Słownik angielsko-polski, polsko-angielski. 1999. Jacek Fisiak, Arleta
Adamska-Sałaciak, Mariusz Idzikowski and Michał Jankowski. Harlow: Pearson
Education Limited. (LPS) Longman Słownik
Współczesny angielsko-polski, polsko-angielski. 2004. Jacek
Fisiak, Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak, Mariusz Idzikowski, Ewelina Jagła,
Michał Jankowski and Robert Lew. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
(LSW) Oxford Wordpower:
Słownik angielsko-polski z indeksem polsko-angielskim. 1997 (2nd
ed. 2002). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (OW) Praktyczny Słownik
angielsko-polski, polsko-angielski. 2002. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN S.A. and K Dictionaries
Ltd. (PS; a
reprint of EPLD) Other references Back, Martyn. 2004. "A new bilingual
learner's dictionary format: The Junior Bilingue". In Williams and
Vessier (eds.) 451-455. Harmer, Jeremy. 2002. "Bilingual
breakthrough". (Preface to the Longman Dicionário
Escolar inglês-português, português-inglês, pp. iv-v.) Williams, Geoffrey and Sandra Vessier (eds.) 2004. Proceedings of the Eleventh International
EURALEX Congress.
K Dictionaries Ltd |
