Oxford R-E CD-ROM (longish)

[Bruno Aeschbacher]

Dear Seelangers

As several persons seem to be interested in the topic, I allowed myself
to write and quote rather extensively on the subject.

I purchased this CD-ROM some months ago here in Geneva/Switzerland
where it is available for CHF 130.-- (approx. US$ 68).

Exact title: "Oxford Russian Dictionary"
ISBN 0-19-268558-9

As a 2nd year student majoring in Russian, I find it most helpful and
user-friendly compared to other dictionaries of the same kind (I do have
many other dictionaries on CD-ROM as I am working as a freelance
translator in French/Italian/German). The vocabulary is up-to-date and
words are embedded in short sentences/examples to show their exact use.
The dict. is reversible from E-R to R-E on a simple click of button. There
are some additional features like templates of R and E business letters,
full text search with boolean operators, bookmarking, printing the whole
article, etc.

This is what it says on the back of the CD-ROM cover:
>>
With over 180,000 words and phrases and over 290,000 translations,
the Oxford Russian Dictionary is the world's most comprehensive and
authoritative bilingual Russian dictionary. Including the text of the very
latest printed edition, the CD-ROM combines all the ground-braking
features of the book with the superb searching facilities of an Oxford
electronic reference work. It reflects the most recent changes in both
Russian an English and is essential for students, translators, and
business people.
>>

Excerpt from the Preface:
>>
The Oxford Russian Dictionary is an amalgamation, harmonization and
updating of The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary (1972, second edition
1984) and The Oxford English-Russian Dictionary (1984) - works which
quickly established and have since maintained their reputations as the
most comprehensive and authoritative in their class. The merits of these
two major contributions to the field have been increased in the present
combined work by the incorporation of a range of enhancements. The
most important of these are the complete resetting of the text to afford
greater ease of consultation, the addition of several thousand new words,
meanings and phrases, and, for the convenience of users whose native
language is not English, the provision of a transcription into the
International Phonetic Alphabet of English headwords. Such transcription
has not been judged necessary in the Russian- English section since
Russian pronunciation is generally phonetic.
>>

Just as Langenscheidt/Longman intend it for their series, Oxford
dictionaries are meant to be integrated in the same user surface. It's
the concept of "extensible library", where there is one shelf (user
interface) with several possible books. I do have the Oxford dictionary
for English-French, but upon importing the R/E dictionary under
the F/E interface, it didn't recognize the Russian fonts (an adapted
version of Microsoft's Times New Roman and Arial, called Times NR
OUP Cyrillic and Arial NR OUP respectively; MS Word does not
recognize them, at least in my case (French Win98 and Office). The
OUP fonts differ insofar from MS fonts as all the Russian words bear
the tonic accent throughout the dictionary (both in keywords an in
text).

Those interested in buying it should make sure to buy version 1.1 and
not 1.0, as some bugs were found in the first version. There is a shor-
cut from MS Word to the dictionary (highlight the word in MS Word
and click on the taskbar shortcut) which didn't work in version 1.0
and which was replaced in version 1.1 by a simple cut-and-paste of the
word. The problem with version 1.1 is : the cut-and-paste still doesn't
work insofar as the font, once pasted, is mere question marks (i.e. un-
solved font problem).

I'll stop here as the article has already grown long. If you should need
any further information please don't hesitate to ask (preferably over
the list).

Best regards,

Bruno Aeschbacher
onurb at swissonline.ch
Geneva, Switzerland