Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 15 • July 2007
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Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak Meaning and the Bilingual Dictionary: The Case of
English and Polish Polish Studies in English
Language and Literature 18
Chapter One deals with the nature of bilingual
dictionaries, their relationship to foreign language learning, and the
typology of bilingual dictionaries. Starting from Sčerba’s typology
focusing on the active-passive dichotomy, the author tries to see how the
latter’s theoretical proposals translate into current lexicographic practice.
She discusses the 4 major functions generally assigned to bilingual
dictionaries: reception in L2; reception in L2 + production in L1; production
in L2; reception in L1 + production in L2. Chapter Two deals with the presentation of meaning in
bilingual dictionaries. Starting from the late John Sinclair’s 2004 motto
that meaning is the only thing that is ultimately worth bothering about in
language, the author shows how recent advances in corpus linguistics and in
cognitive linguistics have impacted the field of bilingual lexicography. She
deals with the crucial questions that any lexicographer needs to answer
before starting a new dictionary project: should the lexicographer favor
lumping or splitting strategies? Should sense divisions be based upon the
source language or the target language? The various mechanisms traditionally
used to account for sense discrimination are examined in minute details and
abundantly illustrated with real examples derived from existing dictionaries.
Collocates, labels, typical objects or subjects, variants and synonyms are
discussed at length, together with the metalanguage and sense ordering issues.
Should etymology be the basic criterion for ordering senses, or should other
criteria, such as frequency of use or even part of speech, be used to decide
which senses to list first? To each of these questions, Arleta
Adamska-Sałaciak provides very clear answers, based upon her experience
with Polish-English dictionaries, but also drawing on monolingual and
bilingual dictionaries dealing with other languages. Chapter Three focuses on the relation between the source
language item and the target language item. Levels and degrees of equivalence
are discussed, as well as the status of glosses, which are useful when a
target language item is less well-known in the target-language culture than
the corresponding source-language item in the source-language culture. The
author very convincingly demonstrates that automatically generating an L2-L1
dictionary on the basis of an L1-L2 dictionary which one reverses without any
human editorial work will produce disastrous results. Even if this is
something which lexicographers are usually well aware of, the author’s
demonstration is worth reading and is illustrated with real examples. The
author’s inevitable conclusion is that full symmetry of the two dictionary
sides is neither possible nor desirable. Chapter Four deals with the question whether usage
should be illustrated with an example or explained. If it is true that users
rely on examples more than on stylistic labels, it may be preferable to
resort to illustrative examples. The question then becomes: what is a good example
and where does it come from? Should examples be coined by lexicographers,
should they be derived from a corpus and, if they are, to what extent can
they be manipulated and edited for the benefit of the user? Invented examples
tend to sometimes be over-informative and may not illustrate typical usage.
Unmodified authentic examples tend to be longer. The author’s conclusion is
that, whenever possible, corpora should be used in the preparation of
dictionary examples, bearing in mind that an example created by a competent
lexicographer who has access to corpus data may work just as well, and
sometimes even better, than raw corpus-based examples. The chapter ends with
a useful and interesting discussion of potential “geopolitical” issues raised
by the inclusion of material that is deemed to be offensive. Inappropriate
and potentially objectionable material (derogatory references to race,
religion, nationalities, sexual preferences, etc.) should be removed before a
dictionary goes to print, since, as is pointed out by the author,
dictionaries are perceived as more socially responsible than was the case 30
years ago. In this book, Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak, who is the
head of the Department of Lexicology and Lexicography at the Thierry Fontenelle Microsoft Natural Language Group
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