Fw: [Lexicog] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement

Tue Nov 6 19:13:11 UTC 2012

Interesting perspective expressed below....

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver 
To: afrilex at freelists.org ; asialex at freelists.org ; DSNA at yahoogroups.com ; lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com ; ishll at lists.le.ac.uk 
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 10:07 AM
Subject: [Lexicog] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement

To round off this thread, from Michael Rundell ...

From: Michael Rundell [mailto:michael.rundell at googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Michael Rundell
Sent: dinsdag 6 november 2012 16:32
To: euralex at freelists.org
Cc: braasch at hum.ku.dk; Simon Krek Gmail; Gilles-Maurice de Schryver; Bullon, Stephen
Subject: Macmillan's recent announcement

I thought it was time I waded into this debate. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so many interesting and pertinent points. Much of what I have to say on the subject has already been said more eloquently by people like Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Simon Krek, and Anna Braasch, and my colleague Stephen Bullon, but i'll put my two cents in anyway.

I think the arguments against abandoning print fall into two main categories, practical and cultural/emotional.

The practical argument is that not everyone in the world enjoys good (or even any) web connectivity. True (though becoming less true all the time). As any publisher would, Macmillan took soundings from its sales people worldwide to gauge future demand for print dictionaries (which of course varies wildly from place to place). The current, final print run takes account of these forecasts, and means we'll be able to satisfy that demand for some time to come. Another model (which we have already applied in a few cases) is that a local publishing partner can produce locally-printed versions of our dictionaries under licence: an elegant and efficient approach for which there may continue to be some demand over the next few years. But the process of digitization is unstoppable - surely we all believe that? -  and we see these measures as contingencies, to respond to a transitional situation. (An aside: I seem to remember Sarah Ogilvie, in a plenary on endangered languages at Euralex 2010, mentioning that in remote areas of Western Australia, aboriginal people took advantage of the satellite technology installed by mining companies there, and all had mobile phones with bilingual dictionaries on them. So even thousands of miles from big cities, digital dictionaries are by no means 'exotic'.)

This doesn't mean paper dictionaries will disappear any time soon: rather that, like vinyl LPs (as we used to call them) they will be more of a niche. There are many languages in the world that haven't yet benefited from the last big lexicographic revolution - the 'corpus revolution' that began in the 1980s - and publishers like Ilan Kernerman have provided excellent resources for what we (reluctantly) refer to as 'smaller' languages. But Macmillan produces dictionaries of English, and that most definitely is not a niche.

The second argument, roughly, is that we all like delving into physical books, and printed dictionaries offer serendipitous discoveries as we idly browse them. Well, up to a point. But as Anna put it, 'most people are not lexicographers or lovers of words, for them a dictionary is just a tool'. The primary market for Macmillan's pedagogical dictionaries consists either of learners of English or people whose first language isn't English but who need to use English in their professional or academic lives (an enormous group). This cohort is predominantly young, and many are digital natives. The odds of a 19-year-old Korean undergraduate taking a paper dictionary down from a shelf in order to resolve a reference query are, like it or not, vanishingly long, and getting longer. Of course, I too appreciate the joys of browsing a dictionary, but then I am (a) in my sixties and (b) a lexicographer. 

Besides, as Simon noted, there are plenty of browsing opportunities in electronic reference materials. In Macmillan's online dictionary you can (a) click on any word in a definition or example sentence and go straight to the entry for that word; (b) click on the 'T' thesaurus button at any word, phrase or word sense and have access to relevant thesaurus data; (c) scroll down the pane to the right of the entry showing 'Related definitions' (thus at the noun 'box' you could also, instantly, look up entries such as box in, inbox, box room, box someone's ears, or think outside the box). 

There are winners and losers, upsides and downsides, whenever things change. But do we want to be like those people who wrote angry letters to the Times when motorized transport first came to London at the beginning of the last century, asking about the future employment prospects for people who made their living by clearing the horse manure from the streets (I am not making this up). As far as Macmillan is concerned, better to embrace a future that will come anyway, than to hang grimly on to a way of doing things whose time is passing. And the advantages of digital over paper are so great, and the opportunities this medium offers are only beginning to be exploited.

And by the way, how would today's exchange of views have worked if we'd all stuck to quill pens and the postal service?

Michael Rundell

Editor-in-Chief

Macmillan Dictionaries

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