[Lexicog] bilingual dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Mery Martinelli wrote:
> I am writing an MA thesis on bilingual lexicography and
> I am interested in talking about some of the most frequent
> difficulties which concern the creation of bilingual dictionaries.

I wonder whether the issues are the same with large commercial bilingual
dictionaries on the one hand, and small dictionaries done in the context of
field linguistics on the other, where one of the languages is an
"indigenous" (minority) language.

In the one case you have two languages with a history of writing and
literature (and possibly even a language academy, for better or worse), a
well defined orthography that is not in flux (apart from the occasional
orthography reform), a potentially large corpus (which now a days is likely
electronic), a well studied grammar, a potentially large and relatively
affluent market, a history of at least monolingual lexicography providing
word lists (and decisions about citation forms, parts of speech) etc.  If
the market is large enough, there is probably funding for a database
designed especially for the particular dictionary, together with technical
support (and maybe even a team of lexicographers).  And if there is a
history of bilingual lexicons, then the target may not be general lexicon,
but a learner's lexicon, or a lexicon for a specialized domain, etc.

In the other case, few if any of these factors hold.  The indigenous
language may be newly written, there may be major disputes over orthography,
major dialectal variation (including differences in borrowing from other
languages), the corpus is probably very small, the grammar is being studied
at the same time the dictionary is being produced, there may be no market at
all for the dictionary, there are probably no existing dictionaries
(although there may be dictionaries in related langauges which can be
helpful), and the lexicon compiler (or the team, if you're lucky) is using a
general purpose lexical database which they may or may not know how to use
well, and with little technical support.  I'm sure others can add to this
list!

It's also not clear to me that the art of lexicography itself is the same
for small/ initial bilingual lexicons as it is for large bilingual lexicons.
For instance, it might be more important to distinguish between synonyms in
a large lexicon than it would be in a small one (simply because there are
more synonyms in a large lexicon).  OTOH, the art of lexicography might be
basicall the same in both cases, with only differences in degree.  I have no
strong opinion on this.

So perhaps the first thing to do for your thesis, is to decide what type of
bilingual lexicography you want to talk about.  (Of course, another
interesting topic would be to compare the two situations I've sketched out!)

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu




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