"When I use a word," said Humpty Dumpty, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass
Although the major European countries have been prolific in bringing dictionaries to press since the early seventeenth century, dictionary production in the twentieth century has grown exponentially in all the major European languages. It is worth mentioning that although in the last two decades there have been revolutionary electronic innovations in format, searchability, presentation and design, in many fundamental respects monolingual general dictionaries produced today, whether in the United States or in Europe, are very similar to those of earlier centuries.
Sexism ... seems to be the hardest to eradicate from dictionary definitions.
As metalexicographer Henri Béjoint explains, their similarities are due to the common origins and parallel historical evolution—from the Renaissance to the present through the turning point of the 18th century—of the European peoples who wrote them. And they have remained virtually unchanged because their traditional form—their conservativism, their being "almost mythical emblems of learning"—exert a powerful influence on popular ideas of what they should continue to be.
The new electronic formats, however, may do away entirely with those entrenched lexicographical traditions. Powerful search engines, for example, obviate the need to alphabetize: Words can now be easily located even when grouped by sound, or by ideas, or concepts, or semantics, or domains, or endings, or etymologies, or collocations.... This field is called 'lexicography of encoding,' and it is perhaps a reaction against dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with their bias towards decoding literary texts.
As cultural artifacts, the political and sociological importance of dictionaries cannot be underestimated. Dictionaries tell us about immigration, assimilation, invasion, aggression, conflict, harmony, loss of innocence, isolationism, industrialization, discrimination. What John Ritchie, the fourth editor of The Australian Dictionary of Biography has said of his dictionary: "The entries throw light on the complexity of the human situation, and on the greatness and littleness of moral response and actual behaviour which this can evoke" holds true for all dictionaries, biographical or otherwise.
Because dictionaries are political, they are like lovers during war time; every so often one turns out to be a Mata Hari. To avoid betrayals, we must find out where they were born, when they were born, whom they were born to, what languages they speak, what ideology they preach, what sins they have committed, what peccadilloes, what indiscretions. Let's take a ride, then, on the surrey of language to explore the gene pool of dictionaries and get the gossip from their peers.
The Table Alphabeticall of 1604 is, by all accounts, the first monolingual English dictionary ever made. Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster from Oakham in Rutland (Coventry), wishing to make engaging the fair sex in conversation a trifle less trying, decided to write a 120-page book "[...] conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usual English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons." It contained 3,000 "hard words" that women and their ilk could utter in the salons of London and sound a little less dumb than they actually were.
If only Mr. Cawdrey had surrounded himself with the wrong kind of women! You know, the kind I am and hang out with: bitches, nags, wenches, hags, shrews, broads, babes, and chicks, we could have cleaned up his mess (my ilk can surely be trusted to do that). I say this because thanks to Simon Winchester's extraordinary The Meaning of Everything, I have the facsimile of Cawdrey's title page staring me in the face. Bobby Boy, for all his erudition, could not keep the spelling of "plaine English words" like "wordes" consistent.
In the wake of Cawdrey's dictionary—more a synonymicon than a true dictionary as Winchester points out—others were to follow. Patrick Galloway lists Bullokar's An English Expositour (1616) written for the benefit of the ignorant, Cockerams's English Dictionarie (1623) for the help of persons with little intellectual capacity, Blount's Glossographia (1656), Phillip's New World of English Words (1658), Cocker's English Dictionary (1704), and, finally, Nathan Bailey's two offerings, the Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) and the Dictionarium Britannicum (1730).
From all these, Thomas Blount's Glossographia of 1656 is worth mentioning in detail. It was this man who started exploring the fantastic complexity of ordinary English used for special purposes. Blount, a barrister in Worcestershire, must have been extremely comfortable working with what we translators now term "the frozen language of the courts," and it must have been his familiarity with the peculiarities of legalese that made his book extraordinary: For the first time in the history of the English language, Blount's dictionary included terms (i.e., words specific to a trade or industry), not just words. Thus, he incorporated the jargon of tradesmen such as cooks and vintners, tailors, haberdashers, and shoemakers. And in publishing them Blount tells us not only about the technology of the day, but also that in order to communicate effectively, you have to know your field's jargon. And it was precisely that—specialized terminology defined—that this brilliant man gave the world. With a gift like that I think that we should ask St. Jerome to scoot over a little bit and share at least a corner of his desk with Tom.
And then the Age of Reason really kicked in. Exactly 99 years after Blount, and of many more efforts from men who tried to classify words, came The Dictionary. If you love Manhattan bookstores as I do, you have probably found yourself at the window of Bauman's Rare Books on Madison drooling over the wonderful first editions (1755) of Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, the book that all educated households of the times possessed. This is the dictionary that set the standard for the following century—and perhaps for all time—of what an English dictionary should be.
In the Europe of the Age of Reason the Florentines had had their Accademia della Crusca since 1582—and their first dictionary Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca in 1612—and France's most feared Forty Immortals of the Académie française issued their first dictionary Le dictionnaire de l'Académie française in 1694, preserving the dignity and integrity of their languages by prescription. What made Dr Johnson's Dictionary special was that it was an English dictionary—and English was not then and is not now—a fixed language. Neither does it have an Academy that would want to do so1.
In addressing the question of Johnson's intentions regarding his Dictionary, Galloway tells us: "[...]we must first debunk one of many popular misconceptions held by the general public, as well as linguistic and literary scholars [...], namely that Johnson was trying to "fix" the English language. Indeed, while his original Plan of an English Dictionary of 1747 is full of prescriptive sentiment, indicating that he was determined to set English in stone once and for all, in fact, through the very process of writing the mighty tome, Johnson became far more modern in his awareness of language. While it was, no doubt, his personal dream to have his fellow Englishmen speak and write correctly, the lesson of his own dictionary taught him the difference between stability and stagnation, as well as imparting a deeper understanding of the living, fluid quality of his native tongue."
But it is always best to hear it from the horse's mouth. This is Johnson waxing eloquent in the 1775 preface to the Dictionary: 'Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design will require that I should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.'
If one reads "The Dictionary" now, one finds Johnsonian eccentricities in abundance. There's the flippant 'Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with indolence, and is paid with flattery,' the vitriolic 'Pension: An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country,' and the sobering 'Distiller: One who makes and sells pernicious and inflammatory spirits.' In addition, Winchester points us to the infamously political definition of 'Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland feeds the people,' and to the libelous 'Excise: A hateful task levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.' But as a dog lover, my favorite Johnsonian definition happens to be concerned with the thoroughly English preoccupation with the state of mind of their beloved companions 'To worm: To deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad.'
We may chortle, but the Dictionary is not alone amidst its contemporaries when it comes to value judgments; the Diccionario de Autoridades of 1726 (of the Spanish Royal Academy) defines the letter 'A' as: 'A. the FIRST letter of the alphabet [...]. It is the first on the list of words because it is the one utterance taught to man by nature from the moment he is born to denote crying, and this is the first sign he gives of having been born; and although females also enunciate it, they do so with less clarity than the males, and its sound (as attested by experience) is more like an 'E' than an 'A' whereby females apparently make it known that they come into this world in lamentation about their first parents Adam and Eve.' [Trans:VA] ('A. PRIMERA letra del Alphabéto [...]. En el orden es la primera, pòrque es la que la naturaleza enseña al hombre desde el punto del nacer para denotar el llanto, que es la priméra señál que dá de haver nacído; y aunque tambien la pronuncia la hembra, no es con la claridád que el varón, y su sonido (como lo acredita la experiencia) tira mas à la E, que à la A, en que paréce dán à entendér, que entran en el mundo como lamentandose de sus priméros Padres Adán y Heva.')
Just for the sake of comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary—that most wonderful of dictionaries—while still under the editorship of the brilliant Dr James Murray (albeit more than a century after the issuing of the Diccionario de Autoridades) defined 'A' as follows: 'A: The first letter of the Roman Alphabet, and of its various subsequent modifications (as were its prototypes Alpha of the Greek and Aleph of the Phoenicians and Old Hebrew); representing originally in English, as in Latin, the 'low-back-wide' Vowel, formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx and lips. The plural has been written aes, A's, As.' The first illustrative quotation comes from a fourteenth-century Northumbrian poem called A Pricke of Conscience by Richard Hampole.' What a difference a century makes in terms of approach!
The passage of time, lexicographical experience, and a better understanding of the immediate world of the lexicographer—one would think—would have eliminated value judgments and somewhat off-the-wall definitions from modern dictionaries. But it hasn't happened. And to that I say, at least occasionally, Dieu Merci, because one of my favorite dictionaries is the Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary. First published in 1901 under the industrious editorship of Thomas Davidson—and since been placed in equally capable editorial hands—it has earned a cult following due to its quirky and individualistic entries. Take, for instance, its slap-on-the-face definition of 'Middle-aged: between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner,' its deliciously gluttonous 'Éclaire: A cake, long in shape and short in duration' (penned by Liddell Geddie, one of its star lexicographers and former editor) and its whimsically patriotic 'Land O' the Leal: The home of the blessed after death—heaven, not Scotland.' You've gotta love these folks.
Chambers, in all its editions since 1901, has gotten away with throwing punches without losing credibility because all of its followers (me included) revere its editors' savvy, erudition, scholarliness, sense of humor, witticism, daring, and tongue-in-cheek panache. For all its quirkiness, Chambers never messes with definitions in any way that would detract from the true meanings of a word or term. What its editors do is make the life of all those of us who live by the written word a hell of a lot more fun. To all in Chambers, I say chapeau!
Not all value judgments in dictionaries are erudite, scholarly, humorous, witty or benign, however. Least edifying of all are entries incorporated into dictionaries during periods when intolerance rules supreme. The 1970 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), issued five years before Generalísimo Francisco Franco's death, is a case in point. Here's how the entry for Marxism reads: The doctrine of Karl Marx and his cronies (La doctrina de Carlos Marx y sus secuaces). And 'love'—in that same edition and continued through the 1983 issue of the DRAE—is defined strictly in heterosexual terms. It was not until very recently that the bias in these two definitions was expurgated.
Likewise, the 1972 edition of the Diccionario Durvan de la lengua española defines 'homosexual' as a 'sodomite,' and the only definition offered for 'bisexual' in a later edition (and for some mysterious reason, undated) on my shelves is 'hermaphrodite.' And the even more 'modern' 1995 edition of El Gran Diccionario de la Lengua Española, Diccionario de uso de la Sociedad General Española de Librería still persists in defining 'homosexual' as "sinónimo de invertido," which, when translated into English, may sound like it is an enlightened definition given the recent prestige of Queer Studies in Academia, but trust me—it is most certainly not a dictionary that keeps up with the times.
Sexism, however, seems to be the hardest to eradicate from dictionary definitions. I really recommend reading the paper by Dr Soledad de Andrés Castellanos їSexismo en la lexicografía española? aspectos positivos en el Diccionario del español actual de Seco, Andrés y Ramos (DEA99) where she praises its authors for having eliminated the third meaning of the DRAE92 of the feminine noun abogada, defined as: 'Informal': a lawyer's wife,' but adds that in the same entry of the DEA99 there were three quotes in the feminine and 12 in the masculine. In her own words: "This proportion seems scarcely balanced" [En las citas, la proporción (3 en femenino, 12 en masculino) nos parece escasamente equilibrada.]
After reading Dr de Andrés's paper on sexism in Spanish lexicography, I decided to take a look at the Diccionario Clave, now available free on-line. To my dismay, the on-line version, in spite of all its bells and whistles, does not allow searching for the feminine form of nouns; you have to search for the masculine head word or lema. Furthermore, the Clave's printed version does not list feminine nouns independently of the masculine entries; in other words, unlike in the DRAE where you would find the feminine noun 'ama' between 'AM' and 'amabilidad,' in the paper Clave 'ama' is not listed at all. It is because it is not listed "where it rightfully belongs" that the search engine in the electronic version cannot locate it. And now that I looked, the undated Durvan doesn't list feminine nouns either. Shame on them.
But going back to "The Dictionary," Samuel Johnson's critics also claimed that by penning definitions such as 'Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections' he violated the lexicographer's Golden Rule: When writing a definition, no word may be used that is more complex or unfamiliar than the word being defined. Well, two and a half centuries later the DRAE03 is still violating that guiding principle. Take, for instance, their infamous entry for the lovely-sounding term feminela, defined as '1. f. Mil. Pedazo de zalea para cubrir el zoquete de la lanada.' In spite of having a translator's vocabulary, I had an inkling that 'zalea' was a soft something, but I wasn't really sure what it was made of; I had heard the term 'zoquete' in Mexico used as a euphemism for 'stupid,' and here that meaning obviously did not fit; and I had absolutely no clue as to the meaning of 'lanada,' other than perhaps something made out of wool. I had to look up all three words in order to try to understand the head word. I say 'try' because each of the three definitions I sought was given by means of previous definienda, like this: 'Lanada (de lana).1. f. Mil. Instrumento para limpiar y refrescar el alma de las piezas de artillería después de haberlas disparado. Consta de un asta algo más larga que la pieza, con un zoquete cilíndrico en el extremo donde va liada la feminela. Whoever wrote those entries will get no helpe from me for getting out of Hell.
Born in 1758, three years after the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, Noah Webster, of New Hartford, CT, published in 1806 the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and in1828 came his magnum opus the American Dictionary of the English Language (ADEL). Since Webster's ADEL was thought by many to have surpassed Dr Johnson's not only in scope—70,000 words compared to Johnson's 43,500—but in authority as well, the American lexicographer's work became the gold standard. In fact, the dictionary enjoyed such appeal that the name 'Webster's' became a byword for quality dictionaries.
Not only did Noah Webster record language as it was being used (a descriptivist position not unlike Johnson's), he simplified or otherwise altered the spelling of a good number of English words (e.g., musick to music; centre to center). Whether he did so out of a nationalistic spirit (America, after all, was a very young country in 1828), or perhaps due to academic interests in phonetics, we'll never know for sure. Whatever his reasons for implementing the changes, it is generally believed that many of the differences between American and British English in spelling and pronunciation stem from these changes made unilaterally by Webster.
Of the many different dictionaries published today under the name Webster, only the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary can be considered the direct lexicographical heir of the Noah Webster 1828 ADEL. Currently edited by Frederick C. Mish, this highly respected dictionary has acerbic critics, especially those who, like Robert Hartwell Fiske, pitch their tents squarely on the prescriptivist camp. In his essay entitled The Decline of the Dictionary, Fiske states: "Lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. The use of disinterested to mean uninterested does not displease a descriptivist. A prescriptivist, by contrast, is a language conservative, a person interested in maintaining standards and correctness in language use. To prescriptivists, disinterested in the sense of uninterested is the mark of uneducated people not knowing the distinction between the two words. And if there are enough uneducated people saying disinterested (and I'm afraid there are) when they mean uninterested or indifferent, lexicographers enter the definition into their dictionaries. Indeed, the distinction between these words has all but vanished owing largely to irresponsible writers and boneless lexicographers." In fact, in the same vitriolic essay Fiske calls the Merriam-Webster lexicographers "Mish and his minions." I think that this description would have pleased whoever penned the assonant "Marx y sus secuaces" definition (DRAE70) quoted earlier, although I must admit that Fiske's alliterative and assonant rendition is much nicer, in form if not in intent.
Nearly a decade after Noah Webster's dictionary became available, a different kind of English dictionary was born in Clapham, published—Winchester tells us—by one Charles Richardson in 1837. What made A New Dictionary of the English Language different was that its author did away with definitions almost entirely, opting instead to show how each word had been used through English history by illustrative quotations.
But in strict terms, Dr Johnson's dictionary was indeed the first English dictionary to use quotations from literary works to illustrate usage; it is a tradition continued to this day—albeit drawing from a much larger time span of literary production and a more open set of criteria for inclusion of non literary terms—by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and by the eight-volume edition of Rufino José Cuervo's Diccionario de construcción y régimen de la lengua castellana, among others.
At first glance it would seem that a prescriptivist institution, Spain's Real Academia de la Lengua Española, had published—as early as 1729, predating Johnson by almost a quarter century and Richardson by about one hundred years—a seemingly descriptivist dictionary based on quotations; namely the Diccionario de Autoridades. Prescriptiveness and descriptiveness, according to Béjoint, are based on two different norms: 'qualitative' and 'quantitative.'
The qualitative norm is based on the usage and on the opinion of the 'best' language users, as determined by a more or less clear consensus. The qualitative norm corresponds to an 18th century type of 'corpus' that lexicographers used to support their observations rather than to establish usage. The quantitative norm, on the other hand, is based not on the observation of canonical texts, but on the observation of the linguistic usage of all 'reasonably fluent members of a community.' Any form is as good as it is used by a certain number of speakers that would make that usage acceptable. The quantitative norm corresponds to the modern 'corpus,' which can be studied with statistical methods in order to determine frequencies. In other words, a dictionary is prescriptive if it uses a qualitative norm; descriptive if it uses the quantitative one. Thus defined, the Diccionario de Autoridades is, indeed, prescriptive.
Béjoint states that all dictionaries are prescriptive. In spite of what Fiske might tell us about the MWC11, it is prescriptive in that it is a book that one consults, in which one tries to find answers. It is also a 'normative' dictionary in that it tells us how to spell words such as music, and center, and meter, and politic. Total descriptiveness is impossible, because the lexicographer cannot avoid making choices. Likewise, total prescriptiveness is unmanageable if it is estranged from the realities of usage.
For those of you who dislike descriptive dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster (MW) and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate (MWC), perhaps this will soften you a bit. Thanks to Scott Huler, I discovered that the MW and the MWC have tables and charts of all sorts that are a heck of a lot of fun to read. In its Ninth Edition, MWC featured the absolutely wonderful Beaufort Scale' description of a Force 5 wind:
5
fresh breeze
19-24
small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters
Huler tells us in his Defining the Wind that he fell in love with this description without knowing why... and then, realizing that he had memorized it without effort, it hit him. Small trees in leaf beGin to sway. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. Glorious iambic pentameter. Just about on a par with Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," me thinks, or Marlowe's "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships." And then the next line: CresTed waveLets form on inLand waTers. Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. Trochaic pentameter. And the true Wow element of this beautiful language is that it was written in 1906 not by poets, but by a team of engineers!
Yet, the MW, whether we like it or not, keeps up with the times. In its Tenth Edition (currently on-line) the lovely iambic pentameter in Force 5 is gone for good, but the trochee is still whistling. And whereas in the Ninth's Force 8 progress was impeded
8
fresh gale
or gale
39-46
breaks twigs off trees; generally impedes progress
in the Tenth, 'progress' spoiled the bucolic landscape for ever more.
8
fresh gale
or gale
39-46
twigs break off trees; moving cars veer
The truth about dictionaries is that whether descriptive or prescriptive, they can be loveable or beastly. Some drive you nuts because they are syntagmatic. That is, they alphabetize derived terms under the 'mother term' and it takes forever to look things up unless you happen to own the electronic version. Some are so wacky that contain set phrases under 'it': it lathers well; or 'we': we shall see; or 'be': be teed off. Others send us spinning by listing meanings in chronological order, instead of in accordance with frequency of use. Some offer syllabification or pronunciation keys, others do not. Some use slang or regionalisms, yet don't mark them as such. Some commit the unspeakable sin of presenting head words in ALL CAPS, or equally bad, Uppercase Them All.
But whatever dictionaries may do or fail to do, and whatever their ideology or political agenda, I hope that after reading this piece on their history you'll start seeing those dictionaries you don't much care for not as hairy warts, but as eccentric friends. After all, they both inevitably grow on you as time goes by.
Acknowledgements
To Gabe, as always, for putting up with my furor scribendi.
To Álvaro Villegas Fontela, reluctant fellow defequeño, for his jamón ibérico and common sense.
To Axel Albin for his pruning shears.
References
Australian Academy on Humanities http://www.humanities.org.au/review/RevTitle.html
Knowing Ourselves and Others http://www.humanities.org.au/review/c5_bennett.html
Béjoint, Henri. (1994) Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Andrés Castellanos, Soledad. (2002) їSexismo en la lexicografía española?
aspectos positivos en el Diccionario del español actual de Seco, Andrés y Ramos (DEA99) http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no9/andres.htm
English Academy of Southern Africa (1961) http://www.englishacademy.co.za/
Fiske, Robert Hartwell. (2003) The Decline of the Dictionary in The Vocabula Review http://www.vocabula.com/2003/VRAugust03Fiske.asp
_______. (2004) The Fiske Ranking of College Dictionaries in The Vocabula Review
http://www.vocabula.com/2004/VRJan04Fiske.asp
Galloway, Patrick (1996) Dictionary Johnson: The Man and His Masterpiece. http://www.cyberpat.com/essays/sam.html
Huler, Scott (2004) Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th-century admiral turned science into poetry. New York: Crown
Stanford University Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language http://garamond.stanford.edu/depts/spc/johnson/intro.html
Winchester, Simon (2003) The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press
______. (1998) The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperCollins
Dictionaries
Cuervo, J.R. (2002) Diccionario de construcción y regimen de la lengua castellana. Barcelona: Herder Available in CD Rom as well.
Clave http://clave.librosvivos.net/ Searches for 'andaluza,' 'ama,' 'maestra' and other feminine nouns give "palabra no encontrada."
Chambers Dictionary (Brooks, Ian ed) (2003) 9th Edition. Earlier editions are sometimes available through Amazon used books.
Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition http://www.merriam-webstercollegiate.com (subscription required)
Merriam-Webster Dictionary on-line edition http://www.m-w.com/ (free)
RAE Diccionario de la Real Academia Española 22Є Edición http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm Earlier editions are available through the NTTL site of the RAE http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográfico de la Lengua Española, Diccionarios académicos, DRAE
RAE NTTL Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográfico de la Lengua Española, Diccionarios académicos, Diccionario de Autoridades http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle
Footnotes
1 South Africa does have The English Academy of Southern Africa, founded in 1961. It is an Association dedicated to promoting the effective use of English as a dynamic language.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article225.htm
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Online dictionary resources for patent, technical and medical translation from Japanese, German and French to English
Note: Because the information provided on the websites of patent offices of countries listed in my articles is being constantly updated, the URLs listed in my articles may be obsolete. Current links to search pages of patent offices that can be used as context-based dictionaries are also available on my website at www.PatentTranslators.com.
I have always been intrigued by the very idea of a dictionary. Or at least since a very young age, I think I must have had an instinctive understanding of the value of a good dictionary. When I was 15 (1967), I found in the attic an unexpected treasure: an old Latin-Greek-German-Czech dictionary, published around 1920. It had more than 600 pages and it was in perfectly good shape except for the binding which was falling apart. I somehow found the money to have it bound again and it came in very handy because for the next 5 years or so I was quite obsessed with Latin. But passion for Latin proved to be a passing phase in the life of this teenager. French proved to be much more interesting, German much more useful, and Japanese well, Japanese was a challenge that I just could not resist, which is why I started learning Japanese as a full time student at Charles University in Prague in 1975, and 30 years later, I am a pretty good beginner.
In mid eighties, when I became a freelance technical translator in San Francisco, mostly from Japanese and German, I would be normally spending more than a thousand dollars a year for quite a few years for technical and medical Japanese-to-English dictionaries at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japan town. It may sound like a lot, but technical dictionaries are very expensive. If you Google a few well known dictionaries, you will see that Stedmans English-Japanese Medical Dictionary costs in 2005 about $350, which is a fairly representative price for a good Japanese-English medical dictionary. I remember that the second edition of Interpress Japanese-English Dictionary of Science and Engineering, perhaps the most comprehensive technical dictionary at the time when it was published, set me back $800 in 1992. The prices of German and French dictionaries are usually more reasonable, Woerterbuch der Medizin und Pharmazeutik (Werner E. Bunjes), for example, costs about $110 in 2005.
I NO LONGER BUY JAPANESE OR GERMAN TECHNICAL AND MEDICAL DICTIONARIES MUCH
But I no longer buy Japanese or German technical and medical dictionaries much. The last one was a German medical dictionary a couple of years ago, and I did not find it really all that helpful. The main reason why I dont have to spend as much money on dictionaries is the fact that I am using databases maintained by the Japan Patent Office (JPO), European Patent Office (EPO), German Patent Office (GPO) and World Intellectual Property Information Organization (WIPO) in English, Japanese, German, and French. The JPO website is the most comprehensive and the most useful resource, because all unexamined (Kokai) Japanese patent applications published since 1971 are provided with an English summary at the following URL: http://www19.ipdl.ncipi.go.jp/PA1/. I can use this URL to input a number of a Japanese Kokai patents to display an English summary of the patent, or to input one or more technical terms in English to display a list of Kokai patent summaries containing these terms. Usually, however, I start my search for a suitable English translation of a Japanese medical or technical term from the Japanese search page of the JPO website, which is at: http://www2.ipdl.ncipi.go.jp/begin/. The big advantage of a website over a traditional type of dictionary is the fact that our search for a correct translation of a technical or medical term can be placed in the proper context. For example, if we need to confirm the English name of a certain pharmacologically active compound and its derivatives, we can specify the (assumed) name of the compound in Japanese together with other terms narrowing down the context (for example: pharmaceutical agent + bioavailability + gastrointestinal tract) in Japanese to display a list English summaries of Japanese patents containing ALL OF THESE TERMS in the same or similar context. The context will thus be much more comprehensive because unlike on a dictionary page, the amount of space available online for context is virtually unlimited. Another advantage is that we can compare different translations of the same terms by different authors of summaries of different patents dealing with the same or similar subject. While the English of summaries of Japanese patent applications available on the JPO website is often not very elegant and sometime hard to understand because the text is obviously written by native Japanese speakers, the technical and medical terms are usually correctly translated from Japanese to English. In some cases a term may be mistranslated (or even avoided, presumably because the translator is not sure of the English equivalent), but these occurrences are relatively rare. (Before we start criticizing non-native translators of Japanese or German patents into English, let us try to imagine what a mess most American translators whose native languages is English would make if they attempted to translate English into Japanese or German). When we are not sure what the proper English term is, once we find a number of summaries in which a certain term is consistently translated in a certain way, we can be reasonably certain that this is in fact the correct translation, or at least a translation that is preferred on the JPO website, which means that this is the term that our clients will be probably using to find additional prior art. This also means that we do not really have much choice but to use the terms that are most commonly used by translators who provide these English summaries to the JPO.
EVERY PATENT TRANSLATOR WILL HAVE HIS TERMINOLOGY QUESTIONED BY A CLIENT AT SOME POINT
Every patent translator will have his or her terminology questioned at some point by a client. While our clients are not always right, we cannot really afford to disagree with their opinion, and they may not be aware that it is not always possible for a translator to anticipate the exact term that the client wants the translator to use. I remember that a long translation of a clinical trial from Japanese to English was cancelled because I used the term secrete instead of discharge (into urine) in my translation. Since this was not a patent, I could not really defend myself by pointing out that secretion is what the Japanese word bunpitsu means and by providing a number of English summaries where this word is translated as secretion in the same context. What is really important to the client in such a case is that the translators adhere to the guidelines for terms to be used in accordance with good clinical practice (GCP) protocol for clinical trials or with good manufacturing practice (GMP) protocol for manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and the actual meaning of the Japanese characters or of the Japanese word is in fact of secondary importance. However, I also remember how on another occasion I was able to placate an anxious patent lawyer who had problems with an unusual Japanese technical term that I used in my translation because this particular term was being questioned by the opposition. Fortunately, I was able to find a number of examples of English summaries of different Japanese patent applications in which the same Japanese term was translated in exactly the same manner. In fact, I could not find other suitable translations of this term. Because the JPO website also lists names of patent applicants and inventors, translators can also use the site to confirm the English spelling of names of Japanese companies and of Japanese personal names, which must be often guessed because multiple and unexpected pronunciation variants of Japanese characters are very popular in Japanese personal names. The website is thus a life saver for a translator who has been, for example, faxed a poorly legible, fourth generation Japanese patent for translation into English, which is almost always untranslatable simply because it is not legible enough. Thanks to the ubiquity of Internet, an experienced translator can: 1. find online a clearly legible copy, 2. query unfamiliar technical terms in Japanese to select a correct equivalent in English, and 3. verify the English spelling of Japanese names and the correct English names of Japanese companies who are usually named as patent applicants, without having to ask the client any questions (to which the client would usually have no answers anyway), from just about any location on the planet. The ability to verify the correct English names of Japanese companies is in fact very important because English names of Japanese companies are sometime very different from what the name really means in Japanese (which is also true about the names of Chinese restaurants), and we definitely do not want to confuse our clients by giving them an incorrect name.
SYNCHRONICITY IS THE TERM THAT COMES TO MIND
Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with ones own life experience, when a sudden synchronism of events that appear to be connected but have no demonstrable causal relationship strikes us as a highly unusual and improbable occurrence. (This was a few decades before the British rock artist Sting made the word popular in his album titled Synchronicity in mid eighties). For example, I may be driving in my car, listening to music on the car radio, and suddenly for some reason I think of a strange word, name, or concept for instance Biarritz, a small city in France that I have never been to, but I remember from some novel, probably, that it is a seaside resort. A few moments later, the radio announcer says something about Biarritz, as it is related to a song to be played next. We all have experienced weird and unexplainable impossible, really coincidences like this. Jung believed that some, if not all, coincidences were not mere chance, but instead an alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstances. Jung also believed that people who are aware of this alignment of forces can shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious (isnt this how Google was invented?). The theory of synchronicity is not testable according to any scientific method and is not widely regarded as scientific at all, but rather pseudoscientific. Some may say that synchronicity is a strand of magical thinking (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Whether synchronicity is scientific or not, a strand of magical thinking is precisely what a translator needs when he or she cannot for some reason find the right word in the target language. Fortunately for us, translators, the forces were aligned just right in universe when Japanese translators started creating English summaries of Japanese patents that were then made available online by the JPO to anybody.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH SEARCHES IN JAPANESE IS REMEMBERING WHICH KEYBOARD YOU ARE USING
During the initial stages of my translation of a Japanese patent, I am often constantly on the JPO website, because this is the stage during which I need to decide which terms I will be using in my translation (even if I am pretty sure that I know the terms quite well). However, always mindful of the invisible hand of cosmic synchronicity, I try to use English terms that are provided in summaries that are available on the JPO website not to disturb the cosmic alignment of magical synchronic forces in universe, unless I strongly disagree with the term and consider it a clear mistranslation otherwise I might have to explain to a client why am I not using those terms, which could be difficult if the client does not understand Japanese. Unlike a few years ago, it is now very easy to use Japanese and English with the same operating system (Windows, in my case). You can either download a free Japanese language capability from the Microsoft website (or through the following link on my website: www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads), or if you have Microsoft Office, Japanese language capability is a built-in feature that can be activated. The problem is that you have to remember whether you are using the English or the Japanese keyboard at any given moment, and because I keep forgetting which keyboard I am using when I am constantly jumping from English to Japanese screens and vice versa, I have to type many things twice. Also, the patent number cannot be copied from a Japanese search to an English search page (because the input method is different, although the numbers look the same on the screen), so you have to input numbers manually while remembering to switch the input to English. The JPO has recently upgraded its Japanese search function, which has a much more elegant interface now that works fine not only with Internet Explorer, but also with other browsers (Mozilla Firefox is my preferred browser). The website can be also accessed from some types of cell phones. I have never used this function, but I can just imagine a busy Japanese patent lawyer, working on his cell phone in a train on the Yamanote train line, pecking away expertly on his cell phone, frantically looking for examples of prior art on the JPO website because the deadline for filing is only a few hours away .
THE JPO DATABASE IS USEFUL ALSO FOR TRANSLATION OF ARTICLES FROM JAPANESE TECHNICAL AND MEDICAL JOURNALS
I also use the JPO website to confirm English equivalents of complicated Japanese technical and medical terms in Japanese professional journals, for example Latin names of plants, animal species, microbiological cultures, or bones, which are sometimes simply transliterated in Japanese articles into katakana (a form of Japanese alphabet). The easiest way to confirm the correct spelling is usually to find an English summary of a Japanese patent containing these terms, or a Japanese patent that lists both the spelling in katakana and in Latin, which is sometime the case. It is of course also possible to use a Japanese search engine to type a Latin name transcribed into katakana to track down the Latin spelling in English, but the JPO website usually provides more accurate context, both in Japanese and in English. One problem with the JPO website is that it is often off-line on Saturdays and Sundays when the database is being updated, and because translation deadlines are often timed for Mondays when normal people (non-translators, also known as civilians in the translating profession) go back to work, Saturdays and Sundays are working days for many translators.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article235.htm
I have always been intrigued by the very idea of a dictionary. Or at least since a very young age, I think I must have had an instinctive understanding of the value of a good dictionary. When I was 15 (1967), I found in the attic an unexpected treasure: an old Latin-Greek-German-Czech dictionary, published around 1920. It had more than 600 pages and it was in perfectly good shape except for the binding which was falling apart. I somehow found the money to have it bound again and it came in very handy because for the next 5 years or so I was quite obsessed with Latin. But passion for Latin proved to be a passing phase in the life of this teenager. French proved to be much more interesting, German much more useful, and Japanese well, Japanese was a challenge that I just could not resist, which is why I started learning Japanese as a full time student at Charles University in Prague in 1975, and 30 years later, I am a pretty good beginner.
In mid eighties, when I became a freelance technical translator in San Francisco, mostly from Japanese and German, I would be normally spending more than a thousand dollars a year for quite a few years for technical and medical Japanese-to-English dictionaries at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japan town. It may sound like a lot, but technical dictionaries are very expensive. If you Google a few well known dictionaries, you will see that Stedmans English-Japanese Medical Dictionary costs in 2005 about $350, which is a fairly representative price for a good Japanese-English medical dictionary. I remember that the second edition of Interpress Japanese-English Dictionary of Science and Engineering, perhaps the most comprehensive technical dictionary at the time when it was published, set me back $800 in 1992. The prices of German and French dictionaries are usually more reasonable, Woerterbuch der Medizin und Pharmazeutik (Werner E. Bunjes), for example, costs about $110 in 2005.
I NO LONGER BUY JAPANESE OR GERMAN TECHNICAL AND MEDICAL DICTIONARIES MUCH
But I no longer buy Japanese or German technical and medical dictionaries much. The last one was a German medical dictionary a couple of years ago, and I did not find it really all that helpful. The main reason why I dont have to spend as much money on dictionaries is the fact that I am using databases maintained by the Japan Patent Office (JPO), European Patent Office (EPO), German Patent Office (GPO) and World Intellectual Property Information Organization (WIPO) in English, Japanese, German, and French. The JPO website is the most comprehensive and the most useful resource, because all unexamined (Kokai) Japanese patent applications published since 1971 are provided with an English summary at the following URL: http://www19.ipdl.ncipi.go.jp/PA1/. I can use this URL to input a number of a Japanese Kokai patents to display an English summary of the patent, or to input one or more technical terms in English to display a list of Kokai patent summaries containing these terms. Usually, however, I start my search for a suitable English translation of a Japanese medical or technical term from the Japanese search page of the JPO website, which is at: http://www2.ipdl.ncipi.go.jp/begin/. The big advantage of a website over a traditional type of dictionary is the fact that our search for a correct translation of a technical or medical term can be placed in the proper context. For example, if we need to confirm the English name of a certain pharmacologically active compound and its derivatives, we can specify the (assumed) name of the compound in Japanese together with other terms narrowing down the context (for example: pharmaceutical agent + bioavailability + gastrointestinal tract) in Japanese to display a list English summaries of Japanese patents containing ALL OF THESE TERMS in the same or similar context. The context will thus be much more comprehensive because unlike on a dictionary page, the amount of space available online for context is virtually unlimited. Another advantage is that we can compare different translations of the same terms by different authors of summaries of different patents dealing with the same or similar subject. While the English of summaries of Japanese patent applications available on the JPO website is often not very elegant and sometime hard to understand because the text is obviously written by native Japanese speakers, the technical and medical terms are usually correctly translated from Japanese to English. In some cases a term may be mistranslated (or even avoided, presumably because the translator is not sure of the English equivalent), but these occurrences are relatively rare. (Before we start criticizing non-native translators of Japanese or German patents into English, let us try to imagine what a mess most American translators whose native languages is English would make if they attempted to translate English into Japanese or German). When we are not sure what the proper English term is, once we find a number of summaries in which a certain term is consistently translated in a certain way, we can be reasonably certain that this is in fact the correct translation, or at least a translation that is preferred on the JPO website, which means that this is the term that our clients will be probably using to find additional prior art. This also means that we do not really have much choice but to use the terms that are most commonly used by translators who provide these English summaries to the JPO.
EVERY PATENT TRANSLATOR WILL HAVE HIS TERMINOLOGY QUESTIONED BY A CLIENT AT SOME POINT
Every patent translator will have his or her terminology questioned at some point by a client. While our clients are not always right, we cannot really afford to disagree with their opinion, and they may not be aware that it is not always possible for a translator to anticipate the exact term that the client wants the translator to use. I remember that a long translation of a clinical trial from Japanese to English was cancelled because I used the term secrete instead of discharge (into urine) in my translation. Since this was not a patent, I could not really defend myself by pointing out that secretion is what the Japanese word bunpitsu means and by providing a number of English summaries where this word is translated as secretion in the same context. What is really important to the client in such a case is that the translators adhere to the guidelines for terms to be used in accordance with good clinical practice (GCP) protocol for clinical trials or with good manufacturing practice (GMP) protocol for manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and the actual meaning of the Japanese characters or of the Japanese word is in fact of secondary importance. However, I also remember how on another occasion I was able to placate an anxious patent lawyer who had problems with an unusual Japanese technical term that I used in my translation because this particular term was being questioned by the opposition. Fortunately, I was able to find a number of examples of English summaries of different Japanese patent applications in which the same Japanese term was translated in exactly the same manner. In fact, I could not find other suitable translations of this term. Because the JPO website also lists names of patent applicants and inventors, translators can also use the site to confirm the English spelling of names of Japanese companies and of Japanese personal names, which must be often guessed because multiple and unexpected pronunciation variants of Japanese characters are very popular in Japanese personal names. The website is thus a life saver for a translator who has been, for example, faxed a poorly legible, fourth generation Japanese patent for translation into English, which is almost always untranslatable simply because it is not legible enough. Thanks to the ubiquity of Internet, an experienced translator can: 1. find online a clearly legible copy, 2. query unfamiliar technical terms in Japanese to select a correct equivalent in English, and 3. verify the English spelling of Japanese names and the correct English names of Japanese companies who are usually named as patent applicants, without having to ask the client any questions (to which the client would usually have no answers anyway), from just about any location on the planet. The ability to verify the correct English names of Japanese companies is in fact very important because English names of Japanese companies are sometime very different from what the name really means in Japanese (which is also true about the names of Chinese restaurants), and we definitely do not want to confuse our clients by giving them an incorrect name.
SYNCHRONICITY IS THE TERM THAT COMES TO MIND
Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with ones own life experience, when a sudden synchronism of events that appear to be connected but have no demonstrable causal relationship strikes us as a highly unusual and improbable occurrence. (This was a few decades before the British rock artist Sting made the word popular in his album titled Synchronicity in mid eighties). For example, I may be driving in my car, listening to music on the car radio, and suddenly for some reason I think of a strange word, name, or concept for instance Biarritz, a small city in France that I have never been to, but I remember from some novel, probably, that it is a seaside resort. A few moments later, the radio announcer says something about Biarritz, as it is related to a song to be played next. We all have experienced weird and unexplainable impossible, really coincidences like this. Jung believed that some, if not all, coincidences were not mere chance, but instead an alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstances. Jung also believed that people who are aware of this alignment of forces can shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious (isnt this how Google was invented?). The theory of synchronicity is not testable according to any scientific method and is not widely regarded as scientific at all, but rather pseudoscientific. Some may say that synchronicity is a strand of magical thinking (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Whether synchronicity is scientific or not, a strand of magical thinking is precisely what a translator needs when he or she cannot for some reason find the right word in the target language. Fortunately for us, translators, the forces were aligned just right in universe when Japanese translators started creating English summaries of Japanese patents that were then made available online by the JPO to anybody.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH SEARCHES IN JAPANESE IS REMEMBERING WHICH KEYBOARD YOU ARE USING
During the initial stages of my translation of a Japanese patent, I am often constantly on the JPO website, because this is the stage during which I need to decide which terms I will be using in my translation (even if I am pretty sure that I know the terms quite well). However, always mindful of the invisible hand of cosmic synchronicity, I try to use English terms that are provided in summaries that are available on the JPO website not to disturb the cosmic alignment of magical synchronic forces in universe, unless I strongly disagree with the term and consider it a clear mistranslation otherwise I might have to explain to a client why am I not using those terms, which could be difficult if the client does not understand Japanese. Unlike a few years ago, it is now very easy to use Japanese and English with the same operating system (Windows, in my case). You can either download a free Japanese language capability from the Microsoft website (or through the following link on my website: www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads), or if you have Microsoft Office, Japanese language capability is a built-in feature that can be activated. The problem is that you have to remember whether you are using the English or the Japanese keyboard at any given moment, and because I keep forgetting which keyboard I am using when I am constantly jumping from English to Japanese screens and vice versa, I have to type many things twice. Also, the patent number cannot be copied from a Japanese search to an English search page (because the input method is different, although the numbers look the same on the screen), so you have to input numbers manually while remembering to switch the input to English. The JPO has recently upgraded its Japanese search function, which has a much more elegant interface now that works fine not only with Internet Explorer, but also with other browsers (Mozilla Firefox is my preferred browser). The website can be also accessed from some types of cell phones. I have never used this function, but I can just imagine a busy Japanese patent lawyer, working on his cell phone in a train on the Yamanote train line, pecking away expertly on his cell phone, frantically looking for examples of prior art on the JPO website because the deadline for filing is only a few hours away .
THE JPO DATABASE IS USEFUL ALSO FOR TRANSLATION OF ARTICLES FROM JAPANESE TECHNICAL AND MEDICAL JOURNALS
I also use the JPO website to confirm English equivalents of complicated Japanese technical and medical terms in Japanese professional journals, for example Latin names of plants, animal species, microbiological cultures, or bones, which are sometimes simply transliterated in Japanese articles into katakana (a form of Japanese alphabet). The easiest way to confirm the correct spelling is usually to find an English summary of a Japanese patent containing these terms, or a Japanese patent that lists both the spelling in katakana and in Latin, which is sometime the case. It is of course also possible to use a Japanese search engine to type a Latin name transcribed into katakana to track down the Latin spelling in English, but the JPO website usually provides more accurate context, both in Japanese and in English. One problem with the JPO website is that it is often off-line on Saturdays and Sundays when the database is being updated, and because translation deadlines are often timed for Mondays when normal people (non-translators, also known as civilians in the translating profession) go back to work, Saturdays and Sundays are working days for many translators.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article235.htm
Choosing a Good Spanish English Translation Dictionary
English Spanish dictionaries come in all shapes, sizes, specialties, and mediums. There are paperback dictionaries, medical dictionaries, desktop dictionaries, electronic dictionaries, good dictionaries, and bad dictionaries.
All the options can be confusing for anybody deciding on how best to start (or improve) their Spanish translation resource library.
The most important thing to remember is that individual needs will (and very rightly should) vary. People who love Spanish translation (and English Spanish dictionaries) are a unique breed.
(It's what makes us special!)
What works for you or your buddy down the street or on the other side of the information highway might not work for you.
However, there are a list of guidelines that I like to follow when deciding how to spend my money on English Spanish dictionaries. I think this checklist can also help you.
1. Don't trust the Internet. Just because it's on the Internet, doesn't mean it's true. This is a warning call to be careful when doing research online for translations of specific words.
Due to the nature of the web, anyone can claim they know everything about Arctic ice fishing and how to translate every related word in both Spanish and English. Don't make your translation final until you've verified your sources and feel good about them.
2. Determine your needs. There are so many choices to choose from when deciding what to get. Narrow down what kind of work you'll be doing.
Are you interested in translating for the medical field? You'll need to invest in medical dictionaries.
Want a good generalized dictionary? Don't spend your time looking at specialized ones.
I always end up spending more on resources I don't need when I haven't determined what exactly I want. It's kind of like going to the grocery store when you're hungry. Not very good on the bank account.
3. Determine the format. Are you looking for just Spanish English translation equivalents or do you want definitions included?
That's usually the difference between glossaries and dictionaries. Glossaries are lists of translations while dictionaries have definitions included.
4. Determine the language(s). Obviously this article is all about English Spanish dictionaries. However, you do need to ask yourself:
Do I need (or want) the dictionary to be a monolingual one or a bilingual one?
This may sound like a silly question at first but it's important to realize that there are a lot of specialized dictionaries that are written in only Spanish or only English.
Legal dictionaries are an excellent example of this. Because laws are different in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world, inividualized resource books have been written which explain the laws of that particular region. These will undoubtedly be different from other regions and will usually be monolingual (as opposed to an English Spanish dictionary).
It's important, then, to have a good library of reference materials in both languages because that will help you translate more effectively.
For me personally, I like to have both bilingual and monolingual dictionaries in order to cross-reference them with each other on meanings of words.
5. Determine the medium. Where do you do most of your translation work?
Do you like to work at your home office?
At the park?
In the library?
Outside by the pool?
In your bed?
The last thing you want to be doing is carting around every English Spanish dictionary you own wherever you go to work on your translations.
Thanks to this technology age, however, there are many options to choose from. Electronic Spanish English dictionaries, computer software, or even programs for your pda all will help you with your needs.
There are still plenty of books, too, if you like the feel of having a book in your hand while your doing your research.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article311.htm
All the options can be confusing for anybody deciding on how best to start (or improve) their Spanish translation resource library.
The most important thing to remember is that individual needs will (and very rightly should) vary. People who love Spanish translation (and English Spanish dictionaries) are a unique breed.
(It's what makes us special!)
What works for you or your buddy down the street or on the other side of the information highway might not work for you.
However, there are a list of guidelines that I like to follow when deciding how to spend my money on English Spanish dictionaries. I think this checklist can also help you.
1. Don't trust the Internet. Just because it's on the Internet, doesn't mean it's true. This is a warning call to be careful when doing research online for translations of specific words.
Due to the nature of the web, anyone can claim they know everything about Arctic ice fishing and how to translate every related word in both Spanish and English. Don't make your translation final until you've verified your sources and feel good about them.
2. Determine your needs. There are so many choices to choose from when deciding what to get. Narrow down what kind of work you'll be doing.
Are you interested in translating for the medical field? You'll need to invest in medical dictionaries.
Want a good generalized dictionary? Don't spend your time looking at specialized ones.
I always end up spending more on resources I don't need when I haven't determined what exactly I want. It's kind of like going to the grocery store when you're hungry. Not very good on the bank account.
3. Determine the format. Are you looking for just Spanish English translation equivalents or do you want definitions included?
That's usually the difference between glossaries and dictionaries. Glossaries are lists of translations while dictionaries have definitions included.
4. Determine the language(s). Obviously this article is all about English Spanish dictionaries. However, you do need to ask yourself:
Do I need (or want) the dictionary to be a monolingual one or a bilingual one?
This may sound like a silly question at first but it's important to realize that there are a lot of specialized dictionaries that are written in only Spanish or only English.
Legal dictionaries are an excellent example of this. Because laws are different in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world, inividualized resource books have been written which explain the laws of that particular region. These will undoubtedly be different from other regions and will usually be monolingual (as opposed to an English Spanish dictionary).
It's important, then, to have a good library of reference materials in both languages because that will help you translate more effectively.
For me personally, I like to have both bilingual and monolingual dictionaries in order to cross-reference them with each other on meanings of words.
5. Determine the medium. Where do you do most of your translation work?
Do you like to work at your home office?
At the park?
In the library?
Outside by the pool?
In your bed?
The last thing you want to be doing is carting around every English Spanish dictionary you own wherever you go to work on your translations.
Thanks to this technology age, however, there are many options to choose from. Electronic Spanish English dictionaries, computer software, or even programs for your pda all will help you with your needs.
There are still plenty of books, too, if you like the feel of having a book in your hand while your doing your research.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article311.htm
Time Pressure and Dictionary Availability
Monografia final
apresentada ao curso de Especialização
em Inglês da Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, como parte do requisito
para obtenção do Certificado de
Especialista em Inglês.
Orientador: Prof. Dr. Fábio Alves
To my mom Maria do Carmo Jordão,
who has always encouraged my interest
in academic studies, saying it is possible.
To my dad Miramar Coelho and to God
for their company.
Summary
1 - Introduction
2 - "Time Pressure in Translation"
Astrid Jensen
3 - "A study of use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation"
Inge Livbjerg and Inger Mess
4 - Conclusion
Introduction
Electronic documentation has become an essential tool in the area of translation studies research. Needless to say, psycholinguistic methods of verbal reporting (Think-Aloud Protocols - TAPs) have also been efficiently used to conduct scientific experiments in this field. This paper is concerned with a summary of two articles, which were published by the Copenhagen Business School in its publication "Probing the process in translation: methods and results" in 1999. The two articles were chosen because both of them are concerned with two essential issues that worry most translators: time pressure and dictionary availability.
The first article "Time Pressure in Translation' by Astrid Jensen focuses upon the results of an experiment carried out to confirm if and how time constraints interfere in three groups of translators at different within three different periods. The paper also outlines the processes and strategies applied by these three groups to cope with time pressure. In this respect, the study investigates if both professional translators and non-translators applied coping tactics when solving problems related to dead-lines and gaps in their own linguistic knowledge. Electronic documentation from the Translog program and its think-aloud protocols were also used as a basis for this paper.
The second article "A study of the use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation" by Inge Livbjerg and Inger M. Mees investigates how the use of dictionaries might influence the process of translation of a text. For the experimental study, the researchers compared ten different translations done by five competent post-graduate translation students. These subjects were asked to translate a general-purpose text from their Danish mother tongue into the English language using the Translog program. The think-aloud protocols were also analysed by the researchers. The first time, no dictionaries were available. After five translations were done, the researchers asked the translators to review their work, now with the possibility of looking words up in dictionaries if they wished to do so.
The focus of the present work is to summarise the main ideas, points and concepts that were provided in both articles.
Time Pressure in Translation
Astrid Jensen
The article looks at findings from the process-oriented part of a PhD project to develop and test hypotheses about how translators cope with time pressure in newspaper translations, following the modern trend of studying the mental processes in translation based on verbal self-reports of cognitive processes.
The methodology employs experiments using the think-aloud protocol (TAP) method of data elicitation. In this regard, translators translate a text and verbalise as much of their thoughts as possible. It is assumed that information is stored in memory with different capacities: a short-term memory with limited capacity and for limited duration, and a long-term memory with large capacity. Information recently obtained is kept in short memory, where it can be processed and reported on. However, only conscious processes can be reported: any automised skills may by-pass short-term memory. Thus, it is not always possible to infer all of professional translators' thought processes from their verbalisation. Another problem with concurrent reports is the extra cognitive load this represents; the person may need to stop verbalising to carry out the main task.
This introspective method was supplemented with computer logging. All translations were done using Translog and concurrent verbal reporting. (Translog records all keyboard activity and saves it in a log-file.)
Coping strategies are mentioned as being used by experienced translators as a mean to reach the goals set by the translation task.
The purpose of the study was to attempt to locate affects of time pressure, to identify processes and strategies used by translators and non-translators, and to verify whether coping tactics would be used by both groups under time pressure and with insufficient background knowledge. In particular, the questions to be answered were:
1. "Does time pressure impose a restriction on problem-solving activities?"
2. "Do different groups apply different strategies to cope with time pressure, and what are the indications of coping tactics?"
The study was based on experiments carried out in the 1997. The informants represented different levels of proficiency in translation; four were professional translators and two were "educated laymen", who use English as a working language. All translated three texts, each on a different topic and from a different source, from English into Dutch, their mother tongue. Time limits of 15, 20 and 30 minutes were set, and the texts were to be translated as if to appear in a quality Dutch newspaper. The average length of the texts was 120 words. The participants could use dictionaries at will and worked in their own offices.
The data analysed was composed of the text, divided into segments, each of one complete sentence, the participants' verbalisations, the Translog data and statistical data. This latter comprised the number of words in the segment, the number of letters, the time taken for translation, for revision and total time taken.
A 4-second pause was chosen as an indicator of a potential problem-solving activity. This suppressed delays due to differences in typing speed. Some pauses were identified as dictionary look-ups, other as comments on problems, memory search or word associations. However, since not all pauses were commented on, they were grouped all together as pauses suggesting problem-solving. A "coding potential" was made to identify processes that took place during translation, which could indicate problem-solving activities. The main source used was Translog (except for dictionary look-ups, which were identified from the TAP).
The specification of translation strategies included borrowing, literal translation, paraphrasing, adaptation, and reduction. Coping tactics were identified as instant naturalisation, transcoding, reconstruction using context, generalisation and omission.
Patterns of common behaviour within groups were identified once it was decided to divide the translators into two separate groups: those with 1-3 years experience, or young professionals, and those with 8-10 years experience, or expert group. Therefore, for the purpose of presenting results, the participants were divided into three groups: non-translators, young professionals and the experts.
The participants all read the text before translating it. They went through the text in a basically linear fashion, translating text elements and, in some cases, editing them. When they had finished, they reread their translations in most cases.
Analysing the results, there was a 14% increase in the number of problem-solving activities and a 21% increase in the number of keystroke when the limit was raised from 15 to 30 minutes. However, there was a 40 % decrease in the speed of typing under the increased time limit, although this may be partly due to increase dictionary look-ups and problem-solving pauses.
As regards the use of dictionaries, there was a clear difference among the three groups. The non-translators used dictionaries most, followed by the young professionals. The experts had approximately half as many look-ups as the young professionals.
More editing took place in the group of young professionals than in the other groups. Non-translators had only about half as many corrections after completing the translation as the experts; who had the same number of corrections during revision as during translation. It appears that the time constraint was felt most by non-translators.
The number of problem-solving activities was highest for the young professionals and lowest for the experts (a difference of 30 %). This suggests an increase in automation of thought processes for the latter group.
The article also gives examples from the translations of each of the translation strategies mentioned earlier. A statistical analysis of the coping tactics used is presented in tabular form. It shows that the main coping tactics used by non-translators were transcoding and omission. On the other hand, the main coping tactics used by professionals were reconstruction and generalisation.
In short, it was found that there were substantial differences not only in the way non-translators and translators dealt with time pressure, but also considerable differences between the young professionals and the experts. All groups, decreasing dramatically with experience used coping tactics. However, it was considered that it would be premature to conclude that the use of coping tactics was caused by time pressure alone. A continuation of the study is planned to ascertain if time pressure plus lack of relevant background knowledge is what motivates the use of coping tactics.
A study of use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation
Inge Livbjerg and Inger M. Mees
The article reports the results of a study carried out to compare how students' translation process without dictionaries differed from their approach when dictionaries could be consulted. Five post-graduate translation students was asked to translate a newspaper article of 126 words from Danish to English while thinking aloud, and spending as much time on the task as they felt necessary. Translog was also used to register the process.
The text chosen to be translated was a topical one with a certain degree of complexity, in which there were several types of problem areas, for instance, metaphors, collocations and potentially ambiguous expressions. The intention was to see to what extent the subjects could arrive at good solutions without dictionaries, and also to see if subsequent access to dictionaries would result in changes in the translations.
The text was first translated without the possibility of consulting dictionaries. The completed translations were saved. After a break, the subjects were asked to look at their translations again to see if they would like to change anything. This time they had access to reference books: a usage book, a Danish-English dictionary and a monolingual English dictionary. However, they were not specifically asked to make use of these. The final result was also saved, so that for each translator there were two products, one without the possibility of consulting dictionaries and one with. The researches were in a different room from the subjects and could see them through a glass panel and hear them via an audio link. Whenever a translator consulted a reference work, the book and page numbers were noted by the researches.
A professional, bilingual translator provided a model translation of the passage, a native speaker assessed the translations as texts, and two experienced Danish translators assessed them as translations. These evaluations determined whether the product had improved, deteriorated or remained stable.
The study compared the first spontaneous solution produced by the subjects and the final suggestion opted for at the end of the stage 1, as well as between the end product of stage 1 and the end product of stage 2. It should be noted that it was not always easy to determine exactly what the first spontaneous solution was. In one hand, an error could be kept, corrected, or changed into a different error; still, a correct solution could be kept or changed into an error or a different correct solution. The problems analysed were those identified as such by the subjects. Moreover, it was important to use Translog and think aloud protocols so that it was possible to have access to the whole translation process. The researchers needed to find out in what point a unit was identified as problematical and if it had been the dictionary or some other process or strategy that had been used to solve the problem.
Altogether, subjects commented on 76 problems. However, a large number of these were common to different subjects: there were only 23 different units in all, which shows a high degree of consensus as to what constitutes a problem.
In stage 1, from the first solution to the one adopted, 48 did not change and 16 were changed either from a correct solution to another correct solution or from an error to a different error. Only 2 correct solutions were changed to errors and 8 errors were corrected.
In stage 2, from the solution adopted at the end of stage 1 to the one adopted after the possibility of consulting dictionaries, 55 did not change; 9 were changed from one correct solution to another or from one error to another. Further more, 3 correct solutions were changed to errors and 7 errors were corrected.
Analysing the whole process, in 56 instances (75.7%) there were no major changes in the quality of the product, that is, a solution which was correct continued correct or changed to a different correct solution, and one which was an error remained an error or changed to another error.
In conclusion, if subjects should retain their first spontaneous choice it would give appropriate solutions in only 52.7% of cases. The process without dictionaries raises this percentage to 60.8% and that with dictionaries to 66.2%. So both have a positive contribution.
Dictionaries were used by subjects to look up between 5 and 14 units, the actual number of consulting being from 10 to 27 since some units involved more than one consultation. Use was made of dictionaries to solve gaps in subjects' vocabulary, to check collocations, for fear of false friends and sometimes because of problems of reception. The original text contained at least 5 items for which there were reception problems, despite being the subjects' native language.
The study also showed that subjects spent a long time on problems for which they had a solution from the start, although this could be a result of the conditions of the experiment. It is not considered, however, that restricting time or avoiding the use of dictionaries is cost-effective, since the subject whose final products were regarded as best by all evaluators was the one who took most time and had most dictionary look ups. Analysing the above, it was concluded that students of translation should be taught to make better use of dictionaries, as well as strategies such as paraphrasing or omission. It is also suggested that organising translation workshops is the best way to further improve the performance of translation students.
Conclusion
After analysing both articles, it can be concluded that expert translators and non-translators actually differ in dealing with the same translation task. Indeed, such remarkable difference lies mainly in what specific strategies are used.
On one hand, experts seemed to have fewer problem-solving activities and did not feel time constraint as much as non-translators did. Actually, as regarding time constraints, there were experts who felt the time available was much more than enough to accomplish the task. In general, they were used to accomplishing such a task in much less time in real work life. On the other hand, non-translators seemed to favour a word-by-word or literal translation and did spend a great deal of time pondering over, or checking words to which they already had a solution from the very beginning. Summing up, non-translators were the ones who most felt time constraint.
In other words, non-translators seemed to be unaware of their own linguistic competence and/or felt insecure about their spontaneous translation. To a certain extent, they depended much more on the linguistic structure of the text while translating and were the ones who most had dictionary look ups when compared with the experts.
Regarding dictionary use, there were cases in which they were used not only to correct errors, but also to change correct solutions into errors. In sort, the second article shows that some subjects did not distinguish "between solutions that can be found in dictionaries and solutions that involve the use of other communication strategies such as paraphrasing or omission".
Based on these assumptions, the conclusion drawn by the present study is that translation students must be taught to make a better use of dictionaries and to master abilities to exploit co-textual and contextual clues. Considering that paraphrasing, generalisation and omission were the strategies most used by the expert group and that such strategies seems to increase with experience; mastering them must always be the goal for translation students in order to help them to reconstruct another text in another language - that is what translation is all about.
Bibliography
CIRANKA, Lúcia Furtado de Mendonça e SOUZA, Vânia Pinheiro de. Orientação para normalização de trabalhos acadêmicos. Ed. EDUFJF. Juiz de Fora, 1993.
COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH GRAMMAR. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1990.
COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH LANGUAGE DICTIONARY. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1990.
COPENHAGEN STUDIES IN LANGUAGE 24. Probing the process in translation: methods and results. Copenhage Business School. Samfundslitteratur, 1999.
DICIONÁRIO OXFORD ESCOLAR. Para estudantes brasileiros de Inglês. Oxford University Press, 2001.
LONGMAN DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH. Harlow: Longman, 1986.
NOVO DICIONÁRIO AURÉLIO DA LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA. 2. ed. ver. amp. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1986.
OXFORD ADVANCED LEARNER'S DICTIONARY. Sixth Edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.
SEVERINO, Joaquim Antônio. Metodologia do trabalho científico. Diretrizes para o trabalho didático-científico na Universidade. Ed. Cortês. São Paulo, 1982.
SWAN, Michael. Practical English Usage. Fourteenth Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002.
THE BBI DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH WORD COMBINATIONS. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1997.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article325.htm
apresentada ao curso de Especialização
em Inglês da Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, como parte do requisito
para obtenção do Certificado de
Especialista em Inglês.
Orientador: Prof. Dr. Fábio Alves
To my mom Maria do Carmo Jordão,
who has always encouraged my interest
in academic studies, saying it is possible.
To my dad Miramar Coelho and to God
for their company.
Summary
1 - Introduction
2 - "Time Pressure in Translation"
Astrid Jensen
3 - "A study of use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation"
Inge Livbjerg and Inger Mess
4 - Conclusion
Introduction
Electronic documentation has become an essential tool in the area of translation studies research. Needless to say, psycholinguistic methods of verbal reporting (Think-Aloud Protocols - TAPs) have also been efficiently used to conduct scientific experiments in this field. This paper is concerned with a summary of two articles, which were published by the Copenhagen Business School in its publication "Probing the process in translation: methods and results" in 1999. The two articles were chosen because both of them are concerned with two essential issues that worry most translators: time pressure and dictionary availability.
The first article "Time Pressure in Translation' by Astrid Jensen focuses upon the results of an experiment carried out to confirm if and how time constraints interfere in three groups of translators at different within three different periods. The paper also outlines the processes and strategies applied by these three groups to cope with time pressure. In this respect, the study investigates if both professional translators and non-translators applied coping tactics when solving problems related to dead-lines and gaps in their own linguistic knowledge. Electronic documentation from the Translog program and its think-aloud protocols were also used as a basis for this paper.
The second article "A study of the use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation" by Inge Livbjerg and Inger M. Mees investigates how the use of dictionaries might influence the process of translation of a text. For the experimental study, the researchers compared ten different translations done by five competent post-graduate translation students. These subjects were asked to translate a general-purpose text from their Danish mother tongue into the English language using the Translog program. The think-aloud protocols were also analysed by the researchers. The first time, no dictionaries were available. After five translations were done, the researchers asked the translators to review their work, now with the possibility of looking words up in dictionaries if they wished to do so.
The focus of the present work is to summarise the main ideas, points and concepts that were provided in both articles.
Time Pressure in Translation
Astrid Jensen
The article looks at findings from the process-oriented part of a PhD project to develop and test hypotheses about how translators cope with time pressure in newspaper translations, following the modern trend of studying the mental processes in translation based on verbal self-reports of cognitive processes.
The methodology employs experiments using the think-aloud protocol (TAP) method of data elicitation. In this regard, translators translate a text and verbalise as much of their thoughts as possible. It is assumed that information is stored in memory with different capacities: a short-term memory with limited capacity and for limited duration, and a long-term memory with large capacity. Information recently obtained is kept in short memory, where it can be processed and reported on. However, only conscious processes can be reported: any automised skills may by-pass short-term memory. Thus, it is not always possible to infer all of professional translators' thought processes from their verbalisation. Another problem with concurrent reports is the extra cognitive load this represents; the person may need to stop verbalising to carry out the main task.
This introspective method was supplemented with computer logging. All translations were done using Translog and concurrent verbal reporting. (Translog records all keyboard activity and saves it in a log-file.)
Coping strategies are mentioned as being used by experienced translators as a mean to reach the goals set by the translation task.
The purpose of the study was to attempt to locate affects of time pressure, to identify processes and strategies used by translators and non-translators, and to verify whether coping tactics would be used by both groups under time pressure and with insufficient background knowledge. In particular, the questions to be answered were:
1. "Does time pressure impose a restriction on problem-solving activities?"
2. "Do different groups apply different strategies to cope with time pressure, and what are the indications of coping tactics?"
The study was based on experiments carried out in the 1997. The informants represented different levels of proficiency in translation; four were professional translators and two were "educated laymen", who use English as a working language. All translated three texts, each on a different topic and from a different source, from English into Dutch, their mother tongue. Time limits of 15, 20 and 30 minutes were set, and the texts were to be translated as if to appear in a quality Dutch newspaper. The average length of the texts was 120 words. The participants could use dictionaries at will and worked in their own offices.
The data analysed was composed of the text, divided into segments, each of one complete sentence, the participants' verbalisations, the Translog data and statistical data. This latter comprised the number of words in the segment, the number of letters, the time taken for translation, for revision and total time taken.
A 4-second pause was chosen as an indicator of a potential problem-solving activity. This suppressed delays due to differences in typing speed. Some pauses were identified as dictionary look-ups, other as comments on problems, memory search or word associations. However, since not all pauses were commented on, they were grouped all together as pauses suggesting problem-solving. A "coding potential" was made to identify processes that took place during translation, which could indicate problem-solving activities. The main source used was Translog (except for dictionary look-ups, which were identified from the TAP).
The specification of translation strategies included borrowing, literal translation, paraphrasing, adaptation, and reduction. Coping tactics were identified as instant naturalisation, transcoding, reconstruction using context, generalisation and omission.
Patterns of common behaviour within groups were identified once it was decided to divide the translators into two separate groups: those with 1-3 years experience, or young professionals, and those with 8-10 years experience, or expert group. Therefore, for the purpose of presenting results, the participants were divided into three groups: non-translators, young professionals and the experts.
The participants all read the text before translating it. They went through the text in a basically linear fashion, translating text elements and, in some cases, editing them. When they had finished, they reread their translations in most cases.
Analysing the results, there was a 14% increase in the number of problem-solving activities and a 21% increase in the number of keystroke when the limit was raised from 15 to 30 minutes. However, there was a 40 % decrease in the speed of typing under the increased time limit, although this may be partly due to increase dictionary look-ups and problem-solving pauses.
As regards the use of dictionaries, there was a clear difference among the three groups. The non-translators used dictionaries most, followed by the young professionals. The experts had approximately half as many look-ups as the young professionals.
More editing took place in the group of young professionals than in the other groups. Non-translators had only about half as many corrections after completing the translation as the experts; who had the same number of corrections during revision as during translation. It appears that the time constraint was felt most by non-translators.
The number of problem-solving activities was highest for the young professionals and lowest for the experts (a difference of 30 %). This suggests an increase in automation of thought processes for the latter group.
The article also gives examples from the translations of each of the translation strategies mentioned earlier. A statistical analysis of the coping tactics used is presented in tabular form. It shows that the main coping tactics used by non-translators were transcoding and omission. On the other hand, the main coping tactics used by professionals were reconstruction and generalisation.
In short, it was found that there were substantial differences not only in the way non-translators and translators dealt with time pressure, but also considerable differences between the young professionals and the experts. All groups, decreasing dramatically with experience used coping tactics. However, it was considered that it would be premature to conclude that the use of coping tactics was caused by time pressure alone. A continuation of the study is planned to ascertain if time pressure plus lack of relevant background knowledge is what motivates the use of coping tactics.
A study of use of dictionaries in Danish-English translation
Inge Livbjerg and Inger M. Mees
The article reports the results of a study carried out to compare how students' translation process without dictionaries differed from their approach when dictionaries could be consulted. Five post-graduate translation students was asked to translate a newspaper article of 126 words from Danish to English while thinking aloud, and spending as much time on the task as they felt necessary. Translog was also used to register the process.
The text chosen to be translated was a topical one with a certain degree of complexity, in which there were several types of problem areas, for instance, metaphors, collocations and potentially ambiguous expressions. The intention was to see to what extent the subjects could arrive at good solutions without dictionaries, and also to see if subsequent access to dictionaries would result in changes in the translations.
The text was first translated without the possibility of consulting dictionaries. The completed translations were saved. After a break, the subjects were asked to look at their translations again to see if they would like to change anything. This time they had access to reference books: a usage book, a Danish-English dictionary and a monolingual English dictionary. However, they were not specifically asked to make use of these. The final result was also saved, so that for each translator there were two products, one without the possibility of consulting dictionaries and one with. The researches were in a different room from the subjects and could see them through a glass panel and hear them via an audio link. Whenever a translator consulted a reference work, the book and page numbers were noted by the researches.
A professional, bilingual translator provided a model translation of the passage, a native speaker assessed the translations as texts, and two experienced Danish translators assessed them as translations. These evaluations determined whether the product had improved, deteriorated or remained stable.
The study compared the first spontaneous solution produced by the subjects and the final suggestion opted for at the end of the stage 1, as well as between the end product of stage 1 and the end product of stage 2. It should be noted that it was not always easy to determine exactly what the first spontaneous solution was. In one hand, an error could be kept, corrected, or changed into a different error; still, a correct solution could be kept or changed into an error or a different correct solution. The problems analysed were those identified as such by the subjects. Moreover, it was important to use Translog and think aloud protocols so that it was possible to have access to the whole translation process. The researchers needed to find out in what point a unit was identified as problematical and if it had been the dictionary or some other process or strategy that had been used to solve the problem.
Altogether, subjects commented on 76 problems. However, a large number of these were common to different subjects: there were only 23 different units in all, which shows a high degree of consensus as to what constitutes a problem.
In stage 1, from the first solution to the one adopted, 48 did not change and 16 were changed either from a correct solution to another correct solution or from an error to a different error. Only 2 correct solutions were changed to errors and 8 errors were corrected.
In stage 2, from the solution adopted at the end of stage 1 to the one adopted after the possibility of consulting dictionaries, 55 did not change; 9 were changed from one correct solution to another or from one error to another. Further more, 3 correct solutions were changed to errors and 7 errors were corrected.
Analysing the whole process, in 56 instances (75.7%) there were no major changes in the quality of the product, that is, a solution which was correct continued correct or changed to a different correct solution, and one which was an error remained an error or changed to another error.
In conclusion, if subjects should retain their first spontaneous choice it would give appropriate solutions in only 52.7% of cases. The process without dictionaries raises this percentage to 60.8% and that with dictionaries to 66.2%. So both have a positive contribution.
Dictionaries were used by subjects to look up between 5 and 14 units, the actual number of consulting being from 10 to 27 since some units involved more than one consultation. Use was made of dictionaries to solve gaps in subjects' vocabulary, to check collocations, for fear of false friends and sometimes because of problems of reception. The original text contained at least 5 items for which there were reception problems, despite being the subjects' native language.
The study also showed that subjects spent a long time on problems for which they had a solution from the start, although this could be a result of the conditions of the experiment. It is not considered, however, that restricting time or avoiding the use of dictionaries is cost-effective, since the subject whose final products were regarded as best by all evaluators was the one who took most time and had most dictionary look ups. Analysing the above, it was concluded that students of translation should be taught to make better use of dictionaries, as well as strategies such as paraphrasing or omission. It is also suggested that organising translation workshops is the best way to further improve the performance of translation students.
Conclusion
After analysing both articles, it can be concluded that expert translators and non-translators actually differ in dealing with the same translation task. Indeed, such remarkable difference lies mainly in what specific strategies are used.
On one hand, experts seemed to have fewer problem-solving activities and did not feel time constraint as much as non-translators did. Actually, as regarding time constraints, there were experts who felt the time available was much more than enough to accomplish the task. In general, they were used to accomplishing such a task in much less time in real work life. On the other hand, non-translators seemed to favour a word-by-word or literal translation and did spend a great deal of time pondering over, or checking words to which they already had a solution from the very beginning. Summing up, non-translators were the ones who most felt time constraint.
In other words, non-translators seemed to be unaware of their own linguistic competence and/or felt insecure about their spontaneous translation. To a certain extent, they depended much more on the linguistic structure of the text while translating and were the ones who most had dictionary look ups when compared with the experts.
Regarding dictionary use, there were cases in which they were used not only to correct errors, but also to change correct solutions into errors. In sort, the second article shows that some subjects did not distinguish "between solutions that can be found in dictionaries and solutions that involve the use of other communication strategies such as paraphrasing or omission".
Based on these assumptions, the conclusion drawn by the present study is that translation students must be taught to make a better use of dictionaries and to master abilities to exploit co-textual and contextual clues. Considering that paraphrasing, generalisation and omission were the strategies most used by the expert group and that such strategies seems to increase with experience; mastering them must always be the goal for translation students in order to help them to reconstruct another text in another language - that is what translation is all about.
Bibliography
CIRANKA, Lúcia Furtado de Mendonça e SOUZA, Vânia Pinheiro de. Orientação para normalização de trabalhos acadêmicos. Ed. EDUFJF. Juiz de Fora, 1993.
COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH GRAMMAR. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1990.
COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH LANGUAGE DICTIONARY. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1990.
COPENHAGEN STUDIES IN LANGUAGE 24. Probing the process in translation: methods and results. Copenhage Business School. Samfundslitteratur, 1999.
DICIONÁRIO OXFORD ESCOLAR. Para estudantes brasileiros de Inglês. Oxford University Press, 2001.
LONGMAN DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH. Harlow: Longman, 1986.
NOVO DICIONÁRIO AURÉLIO DA LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA. 2. ed. ver. amp. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1986.
OXFORD ADVANCED LEARNER'S DICTIONARY. Sixth Edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.
SEVERINO, Joaquim Antônio. Metodologia do trabalho científico. Diretrizes para o trabalho didático-científico na Universidade. Ed. Cortês. São Paulo, 1982.
SWAN, Michael. Practical English Usage. Fourteenth Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002.
THE BBI DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH WORD COMBINATIONS. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1997.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article325.htm
Online dictionary resources for patent, technical and medical translation from Japanese, German and French to English
Note: Because the information provided on the websites of patent offices of countries listed in my articles is being constantly updated, the URLs listed in my articles may be obsolete. Current links to search pages of patent offices that can be used as interactive context-based dictionaries are also available on www.PatentTranslators.com or www.TokkyoHonyaku.com.
Part 1 of this article, also available on this website, described techniques for using the Japan Patent Office website as an online Japanese-English and English-Japanese interactive dictionary. Part 2 will look at websites and techniques that can be used in a similar way for translation into English of patent applications published mainly in German and French, but to some extent also in other European languages.
A hundred years ago or so, there was basically only one way to learn a trade. If you wanted to become, say, a bookbinder or a violin maker in a European country such as Italy or Germany, you had to become an apprentice in the workshop of an established master, which meant that you basically had to work for room and board for a number of years for a stern and stingy master bookbinder or violin maker. After the required number of years, you would learn all there was to learn from one of the masters - apprentices often went to different masters, sometime in different countries, to learn their trade. If you were any good and not too ugly, you would probably eventually marry the master’s daughter and buy him out so that he could retire (according to an old Czech proverb that was something of a consolation to me when I was a teenager, a man is handsome if he is not quite as ugly as the Devil himself). It was not a bad system for the 18th or 19th century. But Internet is a much better system for finding information, in particular when it comes to learning the ins and outs of the relatively recent trade of technical and patent translation of patents in German, French and other languages. That is because translators of foreign patents into English, especially those translate patents from German and French to English, can compare different translations of technical terms on websites that are accessible to anyone.
Even as recently as about a decade ago, relatively few English summaries of foreign patents were available online, mostly only from Japanese and German to English, and before Internet became a second nature to so many people, these summaries would be accessed for a fee basically only from patent offices and not many people would know about them besides patent lawyers. That has all changed, of course, and we can now access information in a number of languages almost instantaneously, provided that we can read and write those languages.
The most commonly used website for copies of patent applications that were originally published in German, French, Japanese, or another language is the European Patent Office (EPO) website. Although the EPO website is very useful for translators who need to find the full text of a patent in a foreign language (including Japanese and sometime also other languages) in PDF format, the disadvantage of this website is that it can be searched only in English in the English interface. It is possible to “guess” a term in English and enter the term in the search page at: http://ep.espacenet.com/ in order to display English summaries of German or French patents to locate a technical term in this manner, but this can be a very time consuming task. If you are looking for a translation of a German term into English, it is much easier to use instead the German interface version on the EPO website at: http://de.espacenet.com/ (which, incidentally, also provides a German interface to national patent offices of some other European countries, searchable to some extent also in French), the quick search page of the German Patent Office (GPO) at:
http://depatisnet.dpma.de/, or you can try the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at: http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/. The EPO search page above (de.espacenet.com) can be searched in German and after a few clicks also in French, and both the GPO and the WIPO websites listed above can be searched both in German and in English. Although only a relatively small portion of published German patent applications has been provided with English summaries available on the GPO website (in contrast to that, all Japanese unexamined patent applications are provided with an English summary), if the patent has been published in German as a PCT application, it will always have an English summary and unlike English summaries provided for Japanese patent applications, English summaries of German applications are almost always written in good and clearly understandable English. One disadvantage of the GPO website is that translators will initially waste some time clicking through several pages to arrive at the quick search page because every search must be started as a new session after several questions have been answered. Because it takes a little bit more time to find what you are looking for on this website, compared for example to the de.espacenet.com or WIPO website, I usually search for English equivalents of German technical terms first at the de.espacenet.com website or WIPO website to save time. On the other hand, an advantage of the GPO website is that it is has a very comprehensive database of German patents and utility models and it can be also used to locate patents published in other languages, such as Japanese or French, since a number of options are suggested to users to facilitate access to patent databases of different countries on this website - from AU for Austria, CZ for Czech Republic, DD for former East German, DE for Germany, US and ZA (which is South Africa). This is in fact a very useful feature and I sometime end up on the GPO website when I am looking for example for something in Japanese, Czech or French if I am unable to find the terms (or the name of a company or of an inventor) on another website. Because every website has slightly different input parameters for searching, it is kind of hard to remember which website you are on and which parameters should be used once the hunt fever sets in. So sometime I simply give up on trying to figure out what kind of a stupid mistake am I making again and go to a different website.
The WIPO search page is particularly useful to translators who handle more than one pair of languages because text can be entered in English, German, French or Spanish. I often use this site to locate and compare English translations of terms in French and German. The WIPO interface is very simple and very fast, especially when you need to switch back and forth between English and French - all you have to do is click on the British or French flag. While the capability to recognize input in several languages is the main advantage of the WIPO website, its main disadvantage is its relatively limited coverage because only PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents are included in its database which goes back only to January 1997. This means that relatively older terms that are no longer used much may not be included in this database. Older German terms can be found on the German Patent Office website (Depatisnet). I also use mostly the WIPO website to search for English summaries of patents published in French. I was using the French Patent Office (INPI) website for this purpose for quite a few years, but because as of 2004, the French Patent Office website requires users to register, establish an account and pay a fee, I no longer use this website.
Translators of patents from German and French to English thus have a number of very useful websites of national or multinational patent offices providing the text of patent documents in the original language, sometime with an English summary. Again, the most useful and comprehensive website for identification of legible original documents is in my opinion the EPO website. However, the website seems to go through a major change every couple of years or so. These changes can be frustrating because all of a sudden, the URL is changed and you have to find the new one, or PDF files may no longer be displayed and printed, for instance if you switch your browser from Internet Explorer to Netscape or Mozilla Firefox, but they do improve the functionality of the site, once you get used to them. One useful option, added recently to the EPO website, is the ability to specify “Include Family” in the “Number Search” (the GPO website has the same feature). This feature can be used for example to identify an original patent on which an application filed in another country is based.
Let us say, for example, that a patent publication that was published originally in German was later modified to comply with the requirements for patent claims in United States and published later in a modified form in English. Translators often receive requests for translation of claims only in similar cases, because the law firm needs to know the exact wording of the new claims in a different version of the patent, filed in a different version in a different country. You can find the entire family of related patents if you mark the option “Include Family”, in the “Number Search” option on the EPO website, which may include patent documents in English, German, Russian, French and Japanese (for example). This option is also useful when you are establishing the terms that you will be using in your English translation if you happen to know several languages, because you can look at the same term, for example, in Japanese, French and German, before you make up your mind as to which English term you want to use.
Also, regardless of whether you are using the EPO website (in English or with the German interface at de.espacenet.com website), or the GPO or WIPO websites, your browser and Adobe software, which is linked to your browser, may or may not work unless you are using Internet Explorer. This also means that you may or may not be able to print PDF files unless you are using Internet Explorer. That is why it makes sense to keep a copy of IE on your computer for this purpose even if you mostly use another browser. Another problem are special characters (such as accent grave in French or sharp S in German). But the foreign term will be usually accepted without the diacritics and/or special accents on most websites (and double s for sharp S and two vowel combinations for umlauts in German should also work). If not, my only recourse is to Google the word in German, French, etc., until I find it displayed with the proper characters and accents and then cut and paste it into the search field. It also works for Japanese once you tell your operating system to recognize Japanese. Needless to say, because Google can be used in a number of languages, it can be also used to track down proper spelling of names, such as company names which have been transcribed into a different alphabet and thus often rendered completely unintelligible, for instance in Japanese or Russian. Once you have the name of the company (which is usually the patent applicant) and the name of the inventor, you may be able to track down the foreign patent application that you are looking for on the EPO website or on the GPO website. However, you may have to install the German or Russian keyboard, which is an option under Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel in Windows XP, if you run searches using words for instance in German or Russian frequently.
Translators of patent applications written in other languages than Japanese, German, or French are less fortunate when it comes to existing English summaries of foreign patents. Although basically every country has a patent office website (and most are listed on my website at www.patenttranslators.com/links.htm, some national patent office websites are basically designed for one function and one function only: to facilitate payment of fees to the patent office. No assistance whatsoever is provided to people who are looking for free information. I tried to figure out how to display a Chinese or Korean patent without registering and paying a fee (through translators from Chinese and Korean who sometime work for me), but without any success. Neither was I able to find a free copy of a patent in Russian or Czech on the websites of the respective national patent offices. Some help is available, again, from EPO, which provides an interface in a number of languages to its vast collection of patent applications in different languages. The interfaces in various national languages are listed in the table below.
However, the language support is limited and a search can be run usually only in English (except for de.espacenet.com which is can be searched in German). Since the European Union has grown from 6 to 25 countries and more are scheduled to join in the near future, patent translators can perhaps hope that in addition to a common currency, common laws, and a huge multilingual bureaucracy in Brussels, patent offices of EU countries will eventually also make it possible to search for terms in patents published in a number of languages spoken in Europe. The websites in the table above also have links to various national patent offices in various countries and it is possible that some of them already have or will be adding a search capability for searching in other languages than English, German, French (and Spanish in some instances).
Unlike a few years ago, patent translators now have access not only to specialized technical dictionaries which they must purchase, but also free access to websites of national and multinational (EPO, WIPO) patent offices, which can be in some cases searched in several languages to display a summary in English (EPO, GPO, JPO), or to switch with one click between English and French summaries (WIPO). At first glance, it may seem like a waste of time to research a single word or a few words for quite some time in this manner. After all, translators usually get paid by the word, regardless of how much time they “waste” doing their research online. But even though I sometime spend a lot of time looking up a term in two or three dictionaries and then end up looking up the term again on two or three websites, I usually do this only at the beginning of a translation. Also, the fact that I can do so means that I don’t have to limit myself to a narrow field. For example, physics, chemistry, electrical and mechanical and automotive engineering, mechanics, electronics, optics, textiles – fields that I would call traditional patent fields, are usually covered in a very comprehensive manner in well known German dictionaries such as Ernst (Dictionary of Engineering and Technology), or DeVries (Technical and Engineering Dictionary). But because these dictionaries are relatively dated, they do not offer much help in fields such as biology and biochemistry, medicine, data processing and telecommunication, particle physics, artificial intelligence, etc. – fields that I would call more recent patent fields. Patent translators can and should try to buy as many specialized dictionaries as they can: for instance Langenscheidt’s Dictionary of Chemistry and Chemical Dictionary, which combined with Patterson’s Dictionary for Chemists and Dictionary of Medicine and Pharmaceutics by Bunjes will cover a lot of terms that are not included in Ernst or DeVries. But a book is necessarily obsolete already at the moment when it is published. The terminological database that is available on websites of national and multinational patent offices can be updated on a daily basis.
I also think that it must be boring to work in a narrow field, although it must be more lucrative, provided that you have plenty of work, if you are a specialist rather than a generalist. The longest patent I have translated so far was in a field in which I can translate often without looking at any dictionary or website at all. It had 155 pages of text and 25 pages of diagrams and flowcharts. After the first 20 pages or so, the work was really boring because the rest of the patent was a tedious description of different combinations of arrangements and embodiments of basically the same thing and the main challenge was really paying enough attention to what I was doing for long hours from morning to night.
If I work in a field that I am less familiar with, my daily output is reduced by at least a half and after a few hours I get very tired and need to take frequent breaks. This is because learning new concepts and terms in different languages involves a lot of heavy thinking when new connections (called synapses) are created between the neurons in our brain, sometime permanent and sometime temporary ones (which means that you have to open the dictionary or go to the website again when you see the same term several months later, although you remember that you encountered that term before and it is just on the tip of your tongue).
But to some people, patent translators for example, learning new concepts and new terms is a lot of fun because it requires a lot mental input and heavy thinking. After all, isn’t that what life really is all about?
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article473.htm
Part 1 of this article, also available on this website, described techniques for using the Japan Patent Office website as an online Japanese-English and English-Japanese interactive dictionary. Part 2 will look at websites and techniques that can be used in a similar way for translation into English of patent applications published mainly in German and French, but to some extent also in other European languages.
A hundred years ago or so, there was basically only one way to learn a trade. If you wanted to become, say, a bookbinder or a violin maker in a European country such as Italy or Germany, you had to become an apprentice in the workshop of an established master, which meant that you basically had to work for room and board for a number of years for a stern and stingy master bookbinder or violin maker. After the required number of years, you would learn all there was to learn from one of the masters - apprentices often went to different masters, sometime in different countries, to learn their trade. If you were any good and not too ugly, you would probably eventually marry the master’s daughter and buy him out so that he could retire (according to an old Czech proverb that was something of a consolation to me when I was a teenager, a man is handsome if he is not quite as ugly as the Devil himself). It was not a bad system for the 18th or 19th century. But Internet is a much better system for finding information, in particular when it comes to learning the ins and outs of the relatively recent trade of technical and patent translation of patents in German, French and other languages. That is because translators of foreign patents into English, especially those translate patents from German and French to English, can compare different translations of technical terms on websites that are accessible to anyone.
Even as recently as about a decade ago, relatively few English summaries of foreign patents were available online, mostly only from Japanese and German to English, and before Internet became a second nature to so many people, these summaries would be accessed for a fee basically only from patent offices and not many people would know about them besides patent lawyers. That has all changed, of course, and we can now access information in a number of languages almost instantaneously, provided that we can read and write those languages.
The most commonly used website for copies of patent applications that were originally published in German, French, Japanese, or another language is the European Patent Office (EPO) website. Although the EPO website is very useful for translators who need to find the full text of a patent in a foreign language (including Japanese and sometime also other languages) in PDF format, the disadvantage of this website is that it can be searched only in English in the English interface. It is possible to “guess” a term in English and enter the term in the search page at: http://ep.espacenet.com/ in order to display English summaries of German or French patents to locate a technical term in this manner, but this can be a very time consuming task. If you are looking for a translation of a German term into English, it is much easier to use instead the German interface version on the EPO website at: http://de.espacenet.com/ (which, incidentally, also provides a German interface to national patent offices of some other European countries, searchable to some extent also in French), the quick search page of the German Patent Office (GPO) at:
http://depatisnet.dpma.de/, or you can try the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at: http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/. The EPO search page above (de.espacenet.com) can be searched in German and after a few clicks also in French, and both the GPO and the WIPO websites listed above can be searched both in German and in English. Although only a relatively small portion of published German patent applications has been provided with English summaries available on the GPO website (in contrast to that, all Japanese unexamined patent applications are provided with an English summary), if the patent has been published in German as a PCT application, it will always have an English summary and unlike English summaries provided for Japanese patent applications, English summaries of German applications are almost always written in good and clearly understandable English. One disadvantage of the GPO website is that translators will initially waste some time clicking through several pages to arrive at the quick search page because every search must be started as a new session after several questions have been answered. Because it takes a little bit more time to find what you are looking for on this website, compared for example to the de.espacenet.com or WIPO website, I usually search for English equivalents of German technical terms first at the de.espacenet.com website or WIPO website to save time. On the other hand, an advantage of the GPO website is that it is has a very comprehensive database of German patents and utility models and it can be also used to locate patents published in other languages, such as Japanese or French, since a number of options are suggested to users to facilitate access to patent databases of different countries on this website - from AU for Austria, CZ for Czech Republic, DD for former East German, DE for Germany, US and ZA (which is South Africa). This is in fact a very useful feature and I sometime end up on the GPO website when I am looking for example for something in Japanese, Czech or French if I am unable to find the terms (or the name of a company or of an inventor) on another website. Because every website has slightly different input parameters for searching, it is kind of hard to remember which website you are on and which parameters should be used once the hunt fever sets in. So sometime I simply give up on trying to figure out what kind of a stupid mistake am I making again and go to a different website.
The WIPO search page is particularly useful to translators who handle more than one pair of languages because text can be entered in English, German, French or Spanish. I often use this site to locate and compare English translations of terms in French and German. The WIPO interface is very simple and very fast, especially when you need to switch back and forth between English and French - all you have to do is click on the British or French flag. While the capability to recognize input in several languages is the main advantage of the WIPO website, its main disadvantage is its relatively limited coverage because only PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents are included in its database which goes back only to January 1997. This means that relatively older terms that are no longer used much may not be included in this database. Older German terms can be found on the German Patent Office website (Depatisnet). I also use mostly the WIPO website to search for English summaries of patents published in French. I was using the French Patent Office (INPI) website for this purpose for quite a few years, but because as of 2004, the French Patent Office website requires users to register, establish an account and pay a fee, I no longer use this website.
Translators of patents from German and French to English thus have a number of very useful websites of national or multinational patent offices providing the text of patent documents in the original language, sometime with an English summary. Again, the most useful and comprehensive website for identification of legible original documents is in my opinion the EPO website. However, the website seems to go through a major change every couple of years or so. These changes can be frustrating because all of a sudden, the URL is changed and you have to find the new one, or PDF files may no longer be displayed and printed, for instance if you switch your browser from Internet Explorer to Netscape or Mozilla Firefox, but they do improve the functionality of the site, once you get used to them. One useful option, added recently to the EPO website, is the ability to specify “Include Family” in the “Number Search” (the GPO website has the same feature). This feature can be used for example to identify an original patent on which an application filed in another country is based.
Let us say, for example, that a patent publication that was published originally in German was later modified to comply with the requirements for patent claims in United States and published later in a modified form in English. Translators often receive requests for translation of claims only in similar cases, because the law firm needs to know the exact wording of the new claims in a different version of the patent, filed in a different version in a different country. You can find the entire family of related patents if you mark the option “Include Family”, in the “Number Search” option on the EPO website, which may include patent documents in English, German, Russian, French and Japanese (for example). This option is also useful when you are establishing the terms that you will be using in your English translation if you happen to know several languages, because you can look at the same term, for example, in Japanese, French and German, before you make up your mind as to which English term you want to use.
Also, regardless of whether you are using the EPO website (in English or with the German interface at de.espacenet.com website), or the GPO or WIPO websites, your browser and Adobe software, which is linked to your browser, may or may not work unless you are using Internet Explorer. This also means that you may or may not be able to print PDF files unless you are using Internet Explorer. That is why it makes sense to keep a copy of IE on your computer for this purpose even if you mostly use another browser. Another problem are special characters (such as accent grave in French or sharp S in German). But the foreign term will be usually accepted without the diacritics and/or special accents on most websites (and double s for sharp S and two vowel combinations for umlauts in German should also work). If not, my only recourse is to Google the word in German, French, etc., until I find it displayed with the proper characters and accents and then cut and paste it into the search field. It also works for Japanese once you tell your operating system to recognize Japanese. Needless to say, because Google can be used in a number of languages, it can be also used to track down proper spelling of names, such as company names which have been transcribed into a different alphabet and thus often rendered completely unintelligible, for instance in Japanese or Russian. Once you have the name of the company (which is usually the patent applicant) and the name of the inventor, you may be able to track down the foreign patent application that you are looking for on the EPO website or on the GPO website. However, you may have to install the German or Russian keyboard, which is an option under Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel in Windows XP, if you run searches using words for instance in German or Russian frequently.
Translators of patent applications written in other languages than Japanese, German, or French are less fortunate when it comes to existing English summaries of foreign patents. Although basically every country has a patent office website (and most are listed on my website at www.patenttranslators.com/links.htm, some national patent office websites are basically designed for one function and one function only: to facilitate payment of fees to the patent office. No assistance whatsoever is provided to people who are looking for free information. I tried to figure out how to display a Chinese or Korean patent without registering and paying a fee (through translators from Chinese and Korean who sometime work for me), but without any success. Neither was I able to find a free copy of a patent in Russian or Czech on the websites of the respective national patent offices. Some help is available, again, from EPO, which provides an interface in a number of languages to its vast collection of patent applications in different languages. The interfaces in various national languages are listed in the table below.
However, the language support is limited and a search can be run usually only in English (except for de.espacenet.com which is can be searched in German). Since the European Union has grown from 6 to 25 countries and more are scheduled to join in the near future, patent translators can perhaps hope that in addition to a common currency, common laws, and a huge multilingual bureaucracy in Brussels, patent offices of EU countries will eventually also make it possible to search for terms in patents published in a number of languages spoken in Europe. The websites in the table above also have links to various national patent offices in various countries and it is possible that some of them already have or will be adding a search capability for searching in other languages than English, German, French (and Spanish in some instances).
Unlike a few years ago, patent translators now have access not only to specialized technical dictionaries which they must purchase, but also free access to websites of national and multinational (EPO, WIPO) patent offices, which can be in some cases searched in several languages to display a summary in English (EPO, GPO, JPO), or to switch with one click between English and French summaries (WIPO). At first glance, it may seem like a waste of time to research a single word or a few words for quite some time in this manner. After all, translators usually get paid by the word, regardless of how much time they “waste” doing their research online. But even though I sometime spend a lot of time looking up a term in two or three dictionaries and then end up looking up the term again on two or three websites, I usually do this only at the beginning of a translation. Also, the fact that I can do so means that I don’t have to limit myself to a narrow field. For example, physics, chemistry, electrical and mechanical and automotive engineering, mechanics, electronics, optics, textiles – fields that I would call traditional patent fields, are usually covered in a very comprehensive manner in well known German dictionaries such as Ernst (Dictionary of Engineering and Technology), or DeVries (Technical and Engineering Dictionary). But because these dictionaries are relatively dated, they do not offer much help in fields such as biology and biochemistry, medicine, data processing and telecommunication, particle physics, artificial intelligence, etc. – fields that I would call more recent patent fields. Patent translators can and should try to buy as many specialized dictionaries as they can: for instance Langenscheidt’s Dictionary of Chemistry and Chemical Dictionary, which combined with Patterson’s Dictionary for Chemists and Dictionary of Medicine and Pharmaceutics by Bunjes will cover a lot of terms that are not included in Ernst or DeVries. But a book is necessarily obsolete already at the moment when it is published. The terminological database that is available on websites of national and multinational patent offices can be updated on a daily basis.
I also think that it must be boring to work in a narrow field, although it must be more lucrative, provided that you have plenty of work, if you are a specialist rather than a generalist. The longest patent I have translated so far was in a field in which I can translate often without looking at any dictionary or website at all. It had 155 pages of text and 25 pages of diagrams and flowcharts. After the first 20 pages or so, the work was really boring because the rest of the patent was a tedious description of different combinations of arrangements and embodiments of basically the same thing and the main challenge was really paying enough attention to what I was doing for long hours from morning to night.
If I work in a field that I am less familiar with, my daily output is reduced by at least a half and after a few hours I get very tired and need to take frequent breaks. This is because learning new concepts and terms in different languages involves a lot of heavy thinking when new connections (called synapses) are created between the neurons in our brain, sometime permanent and sometime temporary ones (which means that you have to open the dictionary or go to the website again when you see the same term several months later, although you remember that you encountered that term before and it is just on the tip of your tongue).
But to some people, patent translators for example, learning new concepts and new terms is a lot of fun because it requires a lot mental input and heavy thinking. After all, isn’t that what life really is all about?
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article473.htm
Research on Dictionary Use by Trainee Translators
Abstract
María del Mar Sánchez Ramos, Ph.D.It seems self-evident that dictionary consultation constitutes an important stage in the process of translation. Dictionaries provide translators with valuable information. However, if we want our students to be efficient users of this reference material, we need to understand how they use these sources of vocabulary in their work. Taking these two statements as starting points, our paper reports on some of our research findings, in which we discuss the results of an empirical research project, conducted with translation students at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain), in order to establish how they use different types of dictionaries. We comment on the main objectives of our research and findings regarding the types of dictionary used the frequency of use, the main reasons for consultation, etc. The conclusion is that our students do not take advantage of the different dictionaries available. In addition, the results suggest that they are not familiar with electronic dictionaries—CD-ROM dictionaries and online dictionaries.
1. Introduction
It is a generally held belief that using dictionaries efficiently can provide valuable benefits to trainee translators. However, as some authors have stated (Roberts, 1992; Mackintosh, 1998; Corpas et al., 2001), there has not been enough empirical research to establish the profile of trainee translators as dictionary users. In this paper, we outline the results we obtained from an empirical research carried out among students of Translation Studies at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) in order to understand the situation of our students. In the first part of this paper, we briefly discuss questions related to offline dictionaries (type of dictionary, frequency of use, reasons for looking up words, difficulties when using dictionaries, etc.). In the second part, we look at to what point our students are familiar with electronic reference tools, mainly dictionaries in CD-ROM format and online dictionaries.
2. Dictionary use and trainee translators
Dictionaries, mainly monolingual dictionaries, are one of the most important tools for the translator due to their valuable lexical information. Nevertheless, authors such as Fenner (1989) or Robers (1997) state that dictionaries—and lexicography in general—occupy a secondary position in Translation Studies:
[...] dictionary consultation is a major component of the research phase of translation. However, [...] the role of dictionaries and dictionary use in this phase and, indeed all translation phases, is underestimated and even denigrated. (Roberts, 1997)
To our knowledge, there has not been enough research on trainee translators as dictionary users. This research is absolutely essential if we take into account that translators spend a substantial amount of time and effort when consulting these sources (Varantola, 1998). Furthermore, this research is relevant if we want to know these students needs and teach them how to use dictionaries efficiently. Generally speaking, works related to studying how students perceive and use dictionaries have been focused on students or learners of second languages2 (Mackinstosh, 1998; Varantola, 1998). We can take as an example the different research projects and theoretical works carried out by Baxter (1980) Bejoint (1981), Hartmann (1983, 1999), Humblé (2001) Luppescu and Day (1993), Campoy Cubillo (2001) or Winkler (2001). As we have stated above, this research hardly exists if we turn our attention to trainee translators. However, there have been several attempts such as the one carried out at the University of Ottawa, where several researchers analysed the use of dictionaries, mainly bilingual ones, on the part of trainee translators in forward and reverse translation (Meyer, 1988, 1990; Roberts, 1990). In line with the use of dictionaries while translating, we can mention other studies such as the ones developed by Starren and Thelen (1990), Mackintosh (1998), Varantola (1998), Atkins and Varantola (1998) Livbjerg and Mees (2003). Other works employ questionnaires3 to elicit information instead of observing trainee translators throughout the translation process (Corpas et al., 2001).
According to Roberts (1992), and many scholars, we as language users need to know how to consult and use dictionaries effectively in order to complete the translation process with success. Moreover, the dictionary is often the first source of information that professional and trainee translators will use. Taking into account the enormous value and benefits an appropriate dictionary use can provide to trainee translators, it seems quite obvious that we need more information about the relationship between dictionaries and trainee translators. And we can access this information through empirical researches on habits of use, needs and different problems dictionaries can cause to our students. In order to solve this lack of research we describe and comment on the main results of the study we conducted with 98 first and second-year students at the Department of Translation Studies at University Jaume I (Castellón, Spain).
3. Design of the empirical research
The main objective of this study, which was carried out during the academic year 2002-2003, was to draw the profile of a group of first and second year translation students as dictionary users. In fact, we wanted to know their needs and habits of use. The general goals were the following ones:
1. To gather information about dictionary use (frequency of use, difficulties of the looking-up process and causes of these difficulties, type of instruction about dictionary skills, etc.).
2. To know the trainee translators' attitude towards different reference tools (printed dictionaries, dictionaries on CD-ROM, and online dictionaries).
3. To evaluate previous instruction on dictionary use.
3.1. Participants
98 first and second year translation students took part into this research. They were enrolled in two subjects from the degree course in Translation Studies: Translation for beginners and Translation (intermediate level). The main reason for our choice of these two subjects was due to the fact that they belonged to the first and second year of the degree course, and, in that way, we would be able to know the starting point of these students in terms of dictionary skills and dictionary use instruction.
3.2. Methodology
We designed a questionnaire for trainee translators (Sánchez Ramos, 2004). It was based on the one developed by Hartmann (1999): "Case study: The Exeter University survey of dictionary use". Our questionnaire included 39 questions. We asked students about types of dictionaries, frequency of use, difficulties of use, instruction in dictionary use, knowledge of electronic dictionaries, etc. We specify questionnaire content in fig. 1. Finally, we used the statistical program SPSS to analyse the questionnaire data.
* Personal information (gender, age)
* Academic information (course, language combination)
* Beginning of dictionary use (bilingual, English monolingual dictionary, and Spanish monolingual dictionary)
* Dictionary most frequently used
* Reason for acquiring a dictionary
* Use of appendices and usage guides
* Frequency of use
* Aim of use
* Reasons for looking up words
* Main problems when looking up words
* Main cause of difficulty when looking up words
* Information about instruction in dictionary use received
* Knowledge and use of electronic dictionaries
Fig. 1
3.3. Analysis of results
The analysis of data provided valuable information related to dictionary use by our students. In the following, we present a brief description of some of the results we obtained4.
1. Type of dictionary. First, one of our aims was to know the type of dictionary students mostly used. Table 1 shows that 87.8% of our students used a bilingual dictionary, followed by an English monolingual dictionary (10.2%) and only 2% selected a Spanish monolingual dictionary. We have to point out that the use of an English monolingual dictionary increases in advanced courses (table 2). This fact, that is, the increasing number of students using monolingual dictionaries in L1 and L2, has been highlighted by other scholars (Battengburg, 1984; Corpas et al. 2001, 246).
Most used type of dictionary
Bilingual dictionary
87.8%
English monolingual dictionary
10.2%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
2%
Table 1
Most used type of dictionary
Translation
(beginners)
Translation
(intermediate level)
Bilingual dictionary
91.8%
83.7%
English monolingual dictionary
8.2%
12.2%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
———
4.1%
Table 2
We also asked students about the specific types of dictionaries they used (table 3). Regarding bilingual dictionaries, students selected the Oxford bilingual dictionary (62.2%) and the Collins bilingual dictionary (58.2%). Other reference tools such as Cambridge, Vox, Sopena, Langenscheit, Harrap or Longman obtained very low percentages. Concerning English monolingual dictionaries, students again showed preferences for one published by Oxford (64.3%) and Collins (29.6%). Finally, in the case of the Spanish monolingual dictionaries, there was no doubt about their favourite: the Spanish dictionary edited by the Royal Spanish Academy of Language (68.4%).
2. Use of appendices and introductions. We exposed our subjects to a list of options including the most common information appendices shown in the different dictionaries. As other studies focused on learners of languages have mentioned (Hartman, 1999; Bejoint, 1981), above all the options offered, trainee translators generally used the list of abbreviations, list of irregular verbs and grammatical information.
Appendices and introductions
List of abbreviations
List of irregular verbs
Grammatical information
Bilingual dictionary
31.6%
28.6%
30.6%
English monolingual dictionary
28.6%
30.6%
30.6%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
38.8%
——-
37.8%
Table 3
It is also interesting to note that information about usage guide occupied one of the last positions. This suggests that our students hardly take advantage of these guides, which is not a very encouraging result if we take into account that they provide some useful information (organization of information, pronunciation guide, etc.). Familiarity with usage guides could produce an immediate effect in both understanding and time reduction of the looking-up process.
3. Frequency of use. Generally, our students used the bilingual dictionary every day and the English and Spanish monolingual dictionaries once a week. As table 4 shows, the more advanced the level, the less the frequency of use. It is also important to point out the percentage of students that used dictionaries less than once a week. This fact reflects the autonomy that students begin to experience and, probably, the use of other strategies (i.e. use of context) to solve translation problems.
Bilingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation
(intermediate level)
Every day
70.8%
59.2%
Twice/three times a day
16.7%
6.1%
Once a week
12.5%
28.6%
Less than once a week
——-
6.1%
Table 4
English monolingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation (intermediate level)
Every day
26.5%
20.4%
Twice/three times a day
8.2%
6.1%
Once a week
51%
49%
Less than once a week
14.3%
24.5%
Table 5
Spanish monolingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation (intermediate level)
Everyday
40.8%
36.7%
Twice/three times a day
4.1%
4.1%
Once a week
42.9%
44.9%
Less than once a week
12.2%
14.3%
Table 6
4. Aim of use. Translation students employed the bilingual dictionary mainly for direct translation (44.9%) and reading comprehension (33.7%). Percentages for writing, speaking and reverse translation were very low. Results for the English monolingual dictionary were similar. And, finally, the Spanish monolingual dictionary was used for productive purposes (38.8%), direct translation (27.6%), and reading comprehension (25.5%).
Bilingual dictionary
%
Writing
17.3
Reading comprehension
33.7
Listening
1
Translation into the mother tongue
44.9
Translation into the foreign language
3.1
Table 7
English monolingual dictionary
%
Writing
26.5
Speaking
1
Reading comprehension
28.6
Translation into the mother tongue
41.8
Translation into the foreign language
2
Table 8
Spanish monolingual dictionary
%
Writing
38.8
Speaking
3.1
Reading comprehension
25.5
Translation into the mother tongue
2
Translation into the foreign language
27.6
Table 9
5. Reasons for looking up words. We offered several options which students had to rank in terms of priority. It should be noted that our final results are similar to those obtained by Mackintosh (1998) or Corpas et al. (2001). Thus, our students used the bilingual dictionary to look for equivalent terms (80.6%), spelling (25.5%), and examples (18.4%). Concerning the English monolingual dictionary, we observed that trainee translators looked for definitions (74.5%) and spelling (22.4%). And, finally, the Spanish monolingual dictionary was used to look for definitions (60.2%), spelling (30.6%), and usage labels (33.7%).
6. Difficulties of use when looking up words. Our questionnaire also explored the difficulties students experienced when looking up words. The first problem they mentioned was that they did not find words they looked for (31.6%). Secondly, students complained that it was extremely difficult to find the specific information they were looking for (32.7%). And, finally, trainee translators were unable to understand definitions (26.5%).
7. Reasons for difficulties. It is worth noting that students attributed the bulk of their difficulties to the dictionary itself. In fact, our students believed that these problems were mainly due to their own dictionary (45.9%) and very few considered these problems related to other reasons such as their lack of familiarity with the dictionary (25.5%), lack of dictionary skills (10.3%) or unclear layout of the dictionary (12.2%).
8. Instructions in dictionary use. Closely related to the previous questions was the one concerning explicit training or instruction in how to use a dictionary. When commenting on instruction in dictionary use, it turned out that most students had not been taught how to use dictionaries (45.9%) and among those answering "yes" only 2% had received exhaustive instruction.
The second part of the questionnaire aimed to ascertain if our students used other types of reference material, specifically electronic tools. In the following paragraphs, we will describe some of the results we obtained.
9. Electronic reference tools. We wanted to know if our students were familiar with electronic dictionaries, one of the tools we believe essential as supporting material for professional and trainee translators. In general terms, students were not aware of any electronic dictionaries on CD-ROM: bilingual dictionary (70.4%), English monolingual dictionary (78.6%) and Spanish monolingual dictionary (60.2%). In contrast, trainee translators were familiar with on-line electronic reference tools. Most students (61.2%) knew online bilingual dictionaries (Cambridge dictionaries online, Babylon, Vox). This fact could also be applied to English monolingual dictionaries (41.8%)—Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Wordmisht, American Heritage Dictionary—and the Spanish monolingual ones (64.3%)—Spanish Royal Academy dictionary and Vox. Nevertheless, these results were not so encouraging if we take into account that our students did not consider themselves "good dictionary users" (only 4.1% defined themselves as good users).
10. Advantages and disadvantages of electronic dictionaries. In terms of advantages and disadvantages of electronic dictionaries, trainee translators highlighted quick access, accessibility, and usefulness as the main advantages and they mentioned lack of skills in using online dictionaries as the main disadvantage.
4. Conclusions
In this paper we have given an account of the study we carried out with 98 trainee translators to discover their profile as dictionary users. It was our main objective to highlight the relationship between dictionaries and trainee translators due to the fact that we are aware of the importance of using dictionaries efficiently during the translation process. On the whole, our results confirm the general and theoretical assumptions obtained by other scholars about dictionary use and trainee translators (Mackintosh, 1998; Roberts, 1990; Varantola, 1998; Corpas et al., 2001), which enhance the view that our students need more training and, therefore, instruction in dictionary use. Up to this point, we have to comment that this research is a sample of what happened with our students, that is, these results cannot be extended to all students of translation. Nevertheless, in our opinion, we believe these results can contribute to our knowledge about trainee translators as dictionary users. To summarize the results of this questionnaire, we can point out two general ideas and conclude that:
1. Our students need instruction in dictionary skills
2. Our students need to become familiar with electronic dictionaries and other reference material
Bearing these conclusions in mind, we hope to eventually move to further research by administering similar questionnaires to a more representative sample of trainee translators in order to gain knowledge of the general profile of students of translation and reflect on the pedagogical implications of developing dictionary skills among our students.
Notes
1 This article is part of a research project (Ref: BFF2003-02561) entitled "Evaluación y Desarrollo de la Competencia Léxica a través de Internet en la Titulación de Filología Inglesa". This project is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.
2 Nesi (2000) describes in detail the main research work carried out about dictionary use and learners of languages. This quantity of academic work proves that this type of research is a well-developed area of study in this field.
3 Despite the fact that we should treat the use of questionnaires to elicit information with caution (Hatherall, 1994), we believe that they are adequate tools for providing preliminary data of a concrete research.
4 The complete questionnaire can be obtained from Sánchez Ramos (2004)
References
Atkins, B. S. and Varantola, K. (1998). "Monitoring dictionary use". In B. T. S. Atkins (ed.). Using Dictionaries. Tübingen: Niemeyer; 83-122.
Battenburg, J. (1989). A Study of English Monolingual Learners' Dictionaries and their Users. PhD dissertation. Purdue University
Baxter, J. (1980). "The dictionary and vocabulary behavior: a single word or a handful?" TESOL Quarterly, 14, 3: 325- 336.
Bejoint, H. (1981). "The foreign student's use of monolingual English dictionaries: A study language needs and reference skills". Applied Linguistics, 2, 3: 207-221
Campoy Cubillo, M. C. (2001). "Dictionary use and dictionary needs of ESP students: An experimental approach". International Journal of Lexicography, 15, 3: 206-228.
Corpas Pastor, G.; Leiva Rojo, J. and Varela Salinas, M. J. (2001). "El papel del diccionario en la formación de traductores e intérpretes: análisis de necesidades y encuestas de uso". In M. Ayala Castro (ed.). Diccionarios y enseñanza. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá; 239-273.
Fenner, A. (1989). "Techniques, presentation and specifications". In C. Picken (ed.). The Translator's Handbook. Londres: Aslib; 43-58.
Hartmann, R. R. K. (1983). "The bilingual learner's dictionary and its users". Multilingua, 2, 4: 195-201.
Hartmann, R. R. K. (ed.). (1999). Dictionaries in Language Learning: Recommendations, National Reports and Thematic Reports from the TNT Sub-project 9. http://www.fu-berlin.de/elc/TNPproducts/SP9dossier.doc. [Consulted on: 19/08/2004].
Hatherall, G. (1984). "Studying dictionary use: some findings and proposals". In R. Hartmann (ed.). LEXeter '83 Proceedings. Papers from the International Conference on Lexicography at Exeter, 9-12 September, 1983. Tübinger: Niemeyer
Humblé, P. (2001). Dictionaries and Language Learners. Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen.
Livbjerg, I and Mees, I. M. (2003). "Patterns of dictionary use in non-domain-specific translation". In F. Alves (ed.). Triangulating Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 123-136.
Luppescu, S and Day, R. R. (1993). "Reading, dictionaries and vocabulary learning". Language Learning, 43, 2: 263-287.
Mackintosh, K. (1998). "An empirical study of dictionary use in L2-L1 translation". In B. T. S. Atkins (ed.). Using Dictionaries. Tübingen: Niemeyer; 123-149.
Meyer, I. (1988). "The general bilingual dictionary as a working too in theme". Meta, 43, 3: 368-376.
Meyer, I. (1990). "Interlingual meaning-text lexicography: towards a new type of dictionary for translation." In J. Steele (ed.). The Meaning-Text Theory of Language: Linguistics, Lexicography, and Practical Implications. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press; 175-270.
Nesi, H. (2000). The Use and Abuse of EFL Dictionaries. Tübingen: Verlag.
Roberts, R. P. (1992). "Translation pedagogy: strategies for improving dictionary use". TTR, 5, 1: 49-76
Roberts, R. P. (1997). "Using dictionaries efficiently". Paper presented at 38th Annual Conference of the American Translators Association, San Francisco, California. http://www.dico.uottawa.ca/articles-en.htm. [Consulted on: 19/08/2004].
Sánchez Ramos, M. M. (2004). El uso de diccionarios electrónicos y otros recursos de Internet como herramientas para la formación del traductor (inglés-español). Tesis doctoral. Universitat Jaume I (Castellón).
Varantola, K. (1998). "Translators and their use of dictionaries". In B. T. S. Atkins (ed.). Using Dictionaries. Tübingen: Niemeyer; 179-192.
Winkler, B. (2001). "Students working with an English learners' dictionary on CD-ROM". Paper presented at Information Technology and Multimedia in English Language Teaching Conference, Hong Kong, 1-2 June http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/conference/papers2001/winkler.htm. [Consulted on: 19/08/2004].
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article476.htm
María del Mar Sánchez Ramos, Ph.D.It seems self-evident that dictionary consultation constitutes an important stage in the process of translation. Dictionaries provide translators with valuable information. However, if we want our students to be efficient users of this reference material, we need to understand how they use these sources of vocabulary in their work. Taking these two statements as starting points, our paper reports on some of our research findings, in which we discuss the results of an empirical research project, conducted with translation students at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain), in order to establish how they use different types of dictionaries. We comment on the main objectives of our research and findings regarding the types of dictionary used the frequency of use, the main reasons for consultation, etc. The conclusion is that our students do not take advantage of the different dictionaries available. In addition, the results suggest that they are not familiar with electronic dictionaries—CD-ROM dictionaries and online dictionaries.
1. Introduction
It is a generally held belief that using dictionaries efficiently can provide valuable benefits to trainee translators. However, as some authors have stated (Roberts, 1992; Mackintosh, 1998; Corpas et al., 2001), there has not been enough empirical research to establish the profile of trainee translators as dictionary users. In this paper, we outline the results we obtained from an empirical research carried out among students of Translation Studies at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) in order to understand the situation of our students. In the first part of this paper, we briefly discuss questions related to offline dictionaries (type of dictionary, frequency of use, reasons for looking up words, difficulties when using dictionaries, etc.). In the second part, we look at to what point our students are familiar with electronic reference tools, mainly dictionaries in CD-ROM format and online dictionaries.
2. Dictionary use and trainee translators
Dictionaries, mainly monolingual dictionaries, are one of the most important tools for the translator due to their valuable lexical information. Nevertheless, authors such as Fenner (1989) or Robers (1997) state that dictionaries—and lexicography in general—occupy a secondary position in Translation Studies:
[...] dictionary consultation is a major component of the research phase of translation. However, [...] the role of dictionaries and dictionary use in this phase and, indeed all translation phases, is underestimated and even denigrated. (Roberts, 1997)
To our knowledge, there has not been enough research on trainee translators as dictionary users. This research is absolutely essential if we take into account that translators spend a substantial amount of time and effort when consulting these sources (Varantola, 1998). Furthermore, this research is relevant if we want to know these students needs and teach them how to use dictionaries efficiently. Generally speaking, works related to studying how students perceive and use dictionaries have been focused on students or learners of second languages2 (Mackinstosh, 1998; Varantola, 1998). We can take as an example the different research projects and theoretical works carried out by Baxter (1980) Bejoint (1981), Hartmann (1983, 1999), Humblé (2001) Luppescu and Day (1993), Campoy Cubillo (2001) or Winkler (2001). As we have stated above, this research hardly exists if we turn our attention to trainee translators. However, there have been several attempts such as the one carried out at the University of Ottawa, where several researchers analysed the use of dictionaries, mainly bilingual ones, on the part of trainee translators in forward and reverse translation (Meyer, 1988, 1990; Roberts, 1990). In line with the use of dictionaries while translating, we can mention other studies such as the ones developed by Starren and Thelen (1990), Mackintosh (1998), Varantola (1998), Atkins and Varantola (1998) Livbjerg and Mees (2003). Other works employ questionnaires3 to elicit information instead of observing trainee translators throughout the translation process (Corpas et al., 2001).
According to Roberts (1992), and many scholars, we as language users need to know how to consult and use dictionaries effectively in order to complete the translation process with success. Moreover, the dictionary is often the first source of information that professional and trainee translators will use. Taking into account the enormous value and benefits an appropriate dictionary use can provide to trainee translators, it seems quite obvious that we need more information about the relationship between dictionaries and trainee translators. And we can access this information through empirical researches on habits of use, needs and different problems dictionaries can cause to our students. In order to solve this lack of research we describe and comment on the main results of the study we conducted with 98 first and second-year students at the Department of Translation Studies at University Jaume I (Castellón, Spain).
3. Design of the empirical research
The main objective of this study, which was carried out during the academic year 2002-2003, was to draw the profile of a group of first and second year translation students as dictionary users. In fact, we wanted to know their needs and habits of use. The general goals were the following ones:
1. To gather information about dictionary use (frequency of use, difficulties of the looking-up process and causes of these difficulties, type of instruction about dictionary skills, etc.).
2. To know the trainee translators' attitude towards different reference tools (printed dictionaries, dictionaries on CD-ROM, and online dictionaries).
3. To evaluate previous instruction on dictionary use.
3.1. Participants
98 first and second year translation students took part into this research. They were enrolled in two subjects from the degree course in Translation Studies: Translation for beginners and Translation (intermediate level). The main reason for our choice of these two subjects was due to the fact that they belonged to the first and second year of the degree course, and, in that way, we would be able to know the starting point of these students in terms of dictionary skills and dictionary use instruction.
3.2. Methodology
We designed a questionnaire for trainee translators (Sánchez Ramos, 2004). It was based on the one developed by Hartmann (1999): "Case study: The Exeter University survey of dictionary use". Our questionnaire included 39 questions. We asked students about types of dictionaries, frequency of use, difficulties of use, instruction in dictionary use, knowledge of electronic dictionaries, etc. We specify questionnaire content in fig. 1. Finally, we used the statistical program SPSS to analyse the questionnaire data.
* Personal information (gender, age)
* Academic information (course, language combination)
* Beginning of dictionary use (bilingual, English monolingual dictionary, and Spanish monolingual dictionary)
* Dictionary most frequently used
* Reason for acquiring a dictionary
* Use of appendices and usage guides
* Frequency of use
* Aim of use
* Reasons for looking up words
* Main problems when looking up words
* Main cause of difficulty when looking up words
* Information about instruction in dictionary use received
* Knowledge and use of electronic dictionaries
Fig. 1
3.3. Analysis of results
The analysis of data provided valuable information related to dictionary use by our students. In the following, we present a brief description of some of the results we obtained4.
1. Type of dictionary. First, one of our aims was to know the type of dictionary students mostly used. Table 1 shows that 87.8% of our students used a bilingual dictionary, followed by an English monolingual dictionary (10.2%) and only 2% selected a Spanish monolingual dictionary. We have to point out that the use of an English monolingual dictionary increases in advanced courses (table 2). This fact, that is, the increasing number of students using monolingual dictionaries in L1 and L2, has been highlighted by other scholars (Battengburg, 1984; Corpas et al. 2001, 246).
Most used type of dictionary
Bilingual dictionary
87.8%
English monolingual dictionary
10.2%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
2%
Table 1
Most used type of dictionary
Translation
(beginners)
Translation
(intermediate level)
Bilingual dictionary
91.8%
83.7%
English monolingual dictionary
8.2%
12.2%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
———
4.1%
Table 2
We also asked students about the specific types of dictionaries they used (table 3). Regarding bilingual dictionaries, students selected the Oxford bilingual dictionary (62.2%) and the Collins bilingual dictionary (58.2%). Other reference tools such as Cambridge, Vox, Sopena, Langenscheit, Harrap or Longman obtained very low percentages. Concerning English monolingual dictionaries, students again showed preferences for one published by Oxford (64.3%) and Collins (29.6%). Finally, in the case of the Spanish monolingual dictionaries, there was no doubt about their favourite: the Spanish dictionary edited by the Royal Spanish Academy of Language (68.4%).
2. Use of appendices and introductions. We exposed our subjects to a list of options including the most common information appendices shown in the different dictionaries. As other studies focused on learners of languages have mentioned (Hartman, 1999; Bejoint, 1981), above all the options offered, trainee translators generally used the list of abbreviations, list of irregular verbs and grammatical information.
Appendices and introductions
List of abbreviations
List of irregular verbs
Grammatical information
Bilingual dictionary
31.6%
28.6%
30.6%
English monolingual dictionary
28.6%
30.6%
30.6%
Spanish monolingual dictionary
38.8%
——-
37.8%
Table 3
It is also interesting to note that information about usage guide occupied one of the last positions. This suggests that our students hardly take advantage of these guides, which is not a very encouraging result if we take into account that they provide some useful information (organization of information, pronunciation guide, etc.). Familiarity with usage guides could produce an immediate effect in both understanding and time reduction of the looking-up process.
3. Frequency of use. Generally, our students used the bilingual dictionary every day and the English and Spanish monolingual dictionaries once a week. As table 4 shows, the more advanced the level, the less the frequency of use. It is also important to point out the percentage of students that used dictionaries less than once a week. This fact reflects the autonomy that students begin to experience and, probably, the use of other strategies (i.e. use of context) to solve translation problems.
Bilingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation
(intermediate level)
Every day
70.8%
59.2%
Twice/three times a day
16.7%
6.1%
Once a week
12.5%
28.6%
Less than once a week
——-
6.1%
Table 4
English monolingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation (intermediate level)
Every day
26.5%
20.4%
Twice/three times a day
8.2%
6.1%
Once a week
51%
49%
Less than once a week
14.3%
24.5%
Table 5
Spanish monolingual dictionary
Translation for beginners
Translation (intermediate level)
Everyday
40.8%
36.7%
Twice/three times a day
4.1%
4.1%
Once a week
42.9%
44.9%
Less than once a week
12.2%
14.3%
Table 6
4. Aim of use. Translation students employed the bilingual dictionary mainly for direct translation (44.9%) and reading comprehension (33.7%). Percentages for writing, speaking and reverse translation were very low. Results for the English monolingual dictionary were similar. And, finally, the Spanish monolingual dictionary was used for productive purposes (38.8%), direct translation (27.6%), and reading comprehension (25.5%).
Bilingual dictionary
%
Writing
17.3
Reading comprehension
33.7
Listening
1
Translation into the mother tongue
44.9
Translation into the foreign language
3.1
Table 7
English monolingual dictionary
%
Writing
26.5
Speaking
1
Reading comprehension
28.6
Translation into the mother tongue
41.8
Translation into the foreign language
2
Table 8
Spanish monolingual dictionary
%
Writing
38.8
Speaking
3.1
Reading comprehension
25.5
Translation into the mother tongue
2
Translation into the foreign language
27.6
Table 9
5. Reasons for looking up words. We offered several options which students had to rank in terms of priority. It should be noted that our final results are similar to those obtained by Mackintosh (1998) or Corpas et al. (2001). Thus, our students used the bilingual dictionary to look for equivalent terms (80.6%), spelling (25.5%), and examples (18.4%). Concerning the English monolingual dictionary, we observed that trainee translators looked for definitions (74.5%) and spelling (22.4%). And, finally, the Spanish monolingual dictionary was used to look for definitions (60.2%), spelling (30.6%), and usage labels (33.7%).
6. Difficulties of use when looking up words. Our questionnaire also explored the difficulties students experienced when looking up words. The first problem they mentioned was that they did not find words they looked for (31.6%). Secondly, students complained that it was extremely difficult to find the specific information they were looking for (32.7%). And, finally, trainee translators were unable to understand definitions (26.5%).
7. Reasons for difficulties. It is worth noting that students attributed the bulk of their difficulties to the dictionary itself. In fact, our students believed that these problems were mainly due to their own dictionary (45.9%) and very few considered these problems related to other reasons such as their lack of familiarity with the dictionary (25.5%), lack of dictionary skills (10.3%) or unclear layout of the dictionary (12.2%).
8. Instructions in dictionary use. Closely related to the previous questions was the one concerning explicit training or instruction in how to use a dictionary. When commenting on instruction in dictionary use, it turned out that most students had not been taught how to use dictionaries (45.9%) and among those answering "yes" only 2% had received exhaustive instruction.
The second part of the questionnaire aimed to ascertain if our students used other types of reference material, specifically electronic tools. In the following paragraphs, we will describe some of the results we obtained.
9. Electronic reference tools. We wanted to know if our students were familiar with electronic dictionaries, one of the tools we believe essential as supporting material for professional and trainee translators. In general terms, students were not aware of any electronic dictionaries on CD-ROM: bilingual dictionary (70.4%), English monolingual dictionary (78.6%) and Spanish monolingual dictionary (60.2%). In contrast, trainee translators were familiar with on-line electronic reference tools. Most students (61.2%) knew online bilingual dictionaries (Cambridge dictionaries online, Babylon, Vox). This fact could also be applied to English monolingual dictionaries (41.8%)—Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Wordmisht, American Heritage Dictionary—and the Spanish monolingual ones (64.3%)—Spanish Royal Academy dictionary and Vox. Nevertheless, these results were not so encouraging if we take into account that our students did not consider themselves "good dictionary users" (only 4.1% defined themselves as good users).
10. Advantages and disadvantages of electronic dictionaries. In terms of advantages and disadvantages of electronic dictionaries, trainee translators highlighted quick access, accessibility, and usefulness as the main advantages and they mentioned lack of skills in using online dictionaries as the main disadvantage.
4. Conclusions
In this paper we have given an account of the study we carried out with 98 trainee translators to discover their profile as dictionary users. It was our main objective to highlight the relationship between dictionaries and trainee translators due to the fact that we are aware of the importance of using dictionaries efficiently during the translation process. On the whole, our results confirm the general and theoretical assumptions obtained by other scholars about dictionary use and trainee translators (Mackintosh, 1998; Roberts, 1990; Varantola, 1998; Corpas et al., 2001), which enhance the view that our students need more training and, therefore, instruction in dictionary use. Up to this point, we have to comment that this research is a sample of what happened with our students, that is, these results cannot be extended to all students of translation. Nevertheless, in our opinion, we believe these results can contribute to our knowledge about trainee translators as dictionary users. To summarize the results of this questionnaire, we can point out two general ideas and conclude that:
1. Our students need instruction in dictionary skills
2. Our students need to become familiar with electronic dictionaries and other reference material
Bearing these conclusions in mind, we hope to eventually move to further research by administering similar questionnaires to a more representative sample of trainee translators in order to gain knowledge of the general profile of students of translation and reflect on the pedagogical implications of developing dictionary skills among our students.
Notes
1 This article is part of a research project (Ref: BFF2003-02561) entitled "Evaluación y Desarrollo de la Competencia Léxica a través de Internet en la Titulación de Filología Inglesa". This project is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.
2 Nesi (2000) describes in detail the main research work carried out about dictionary use and learners of languages. This quantity of academic work proves that this type of research is a well-developed area of study in this field.
3 Despite the fact that we should treat the use of questionnaires to elicit information with caution (Hatherall, 1994), we believe that they are adequate tools for providing preliminary data of a concrete research.
4 The complete questionnaire can be obtained from Sánchez Ramos (2004)
References
Atkins, B. S. and Varantola, K. (1998). "Monitoring dictionary use". In B. T. S. Atkins (ed.). Using Dictionaries. Tübingen: Niemeyer; 83-122.
Battenburg, J. (1989). A Study of English Monolingual Learners' Dictionaries and their Users. PhD dissertation. Purdue University
Baxter, J. (1980). "The dictionary and vocabulary behavior: a single word or a handful?" TESOL Quarterly, 14, 3: 325- 336.
Bejoint, H. (1981). "The foreign student's use of monolingual English dictionaries: A study language needs and reference skills". Applied Linguistics, 2, 3: 207-221
Campoy Cubillo, M. C. (2001). "Dictionary use and dictionary needs of ESP students: An experimental approach". International Journal of Lexicography, 15, 3: 206-228.
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http://www.translationdirectory.com/article476.htm
On Dictionaries: A Conversation with Ilan Stavans
VA: What is language?
IS: The use of standardized symbols to communicate in a structured and consistent fashion.
VA: Standardized symbols?
IS: Sounds make words and words are symbols. By circumscribing the sounds PE-YO-TE to the small, soft, thornless, blue-and-green cactus found in Mexico and in the Southwestern United States, society attaches a name to the object. The name represents the object and stands in its stead. Objects have specific words attached. This specificity is crucial, for if the cactus changed every minute, language would defeat its own purpose. It would be shaped by chaos.
VA: A dictionary, then, is a catalogue of symbols...
Ilan Stavans IS: ...pertaining to a specific group of people.
VA: Jean Cocteau once quipped that even the greatest masterpieces of literature are nothing but a dictionary out of order.
IS: Yes, the whole of Catcher in the Rye is in the Oxford English Dictionary, ready to be unscrambled. Similarly, one could argue that a dictionary is a narrative in a state of fragmentation. Or else, in discombobulated format.
VA: Lovely word, discombobulated. It is the kind of gem we call in Spanish a pentavocálica, for it has all five vowels. But going back to "dictionary," Thomas Aquinas warned us to "Beware the man of one book." Does this maxim apply to dictionaries?
IS: Lexicons are most dangerous artifacts: they surreptitiously get under our skin, influencing every thought we have, every aspect of culture we engage in. Yet, I'm in awe at the sheer courage they distill. Any attempt to catalogue an entire language is a quixotic effort.
VA: You called lexicons "artifacts."
IS: An "artifact" is an object crafted by humans, usually of cultural or historical interest. I like the familiarity the word has with "artifice," which denotes cleverness. Lexicons are also artifices in that they are cunning devices used to trick or deceive people. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language of 1755, calls attention to the Latin root for "dictionary," dictionarium, then states: "A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning." And he quotes from Brown's Vulgar Errours: "That there is an Art, which without compact commandeth the powers of Hell; whence some have delivered the polity of spirits, and left an account even to their Provincial Dominions: that they stand in awe of Charms, Spels, and Conjurations; that he is afraid of letters and characters, of notes and dashes, which set together do signifie nothing, not only in the dictionary of man, but the subtiler vocabulary of Satan."
VA: One of my favorite etymologies is that of "intellect." According to the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1991), it is derived from the Latin root intelligere: 'to perceive, to choose between.' This is a compound verb formed by the prefix inter- 'between' and legere: 'gather, choose, read.' Thus, "intellect" means being able to read between the lines. Do you have a favorite etymology?
IS: The word "persona," which in Latin means mask. It was also used to describe the character played on stage by an actor. Over time "persona" has come to be understood as the part of one's character in display for others. This was used in contrast with "anima," a reference to the soul. (In Spanish there is also the noun duende, used, among others, by Federico García Lorca.) Thus, "personable" means sociable, possessing a pleasant demeanor. And the endless variations: personal, personality, personate, personhood. In Anglo-Saxon, there are the synonyms "people" and "persons." In Romance languages, a "persona"—a gorgeous word, by the way—is an individual.
VA: The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. In Emerson's words, "Language is fossil poetry." Oliver Wendell Holmes conveyed a similar idea when he defined "word" as the skin of a living thought and said that whenever he felt like reading poetry, he would read his dictionary. How would you define "word"?
IS: Words are the fabric we use to dress our thoughts.
VA: You suggest in your book Dictionary Days that each culture has the dictionaries it deserves, which echoes Gandhi's opinion that every man at fifty wears the face that he deserves. You added that dictionaries are like mirrors, and, as such, are a reflection of the people that produced and consumed them. Yet Jonathon Green, in Chasing the Sun, argued that of the two most influential lexicographers in the US and England, Noah Webster and Dr. Johnson, respectively, the former gives his readers a low church, Republican view of the world whereas the latter gives his readers an Anglican, Tory worldview. Green further claims that what both men were doing, although neither articulated it as such, was playing God—or, if not God, at least Moses descending from the Sinai with the Tablets of the Law. If dictionaries are indeed written by a theocracy, if they are canonical and have authority, do they truly reflect the wants of the consumer, as you claim they do?
IS: Playing G-d is a common attitude... Every artist and intellectual, regardless of talent, engages in it. The ultimate yet impossible dream of the human mind is to explain and codify the universe. The result must be legible to others. This means the piece produced has to please others—in mercantile terms, it needs to be "consumed." No lexicographer lives on an island: the data collected comes from the people and it goes back to them.
VA: Mark Twain quipped that in German a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. In French, "vagina" is masculine; in Italian, "flower" is masculine. Germany is a Fatherland while Russia is a Motherland. Furthermore, in Spanish we have issues of size and worth happening conceptually when we juxtapose certain nouns with gender desinences like barco/barca and charco/charca. Of the languages you speak, which is the most idiosyncratic and why?
IS: Each language has its own idiosyncrasy. This is because languages are shaped out of spontaneous historical changes, not in a laboratory. The reason why Esperanto, the 19th century "rational" language created by the linguist L.L. Zamenhof of Warsaw, Poland (part of Russia when he was active), and known today as "the language for the global village" (doesn't English now fulfill that role?), is so predictive is that it is genetically engineered, so to speak. With its 28 letters, it has little by way of surprise. Personally, I love gender desinences in Romance languages: el sexo is masculine but la sexualidad is feminine. This is telling, isn't it?
VA: When you come across a newly published dictionary in a store, or one in somebody's shelves, what crosses your mind?
IS: First, I must say I marvel at its sheer existence. I ask: Is this yet another attempt at cataloguing human language? How is this item different from any other? Might it be closer to perfection? Second, I browse through its pages, caressing them, jumping from one definition to another. My mind sets on a somewhat exotic target: what about the word "percolate"? Or else, "numismatic"? Third, I choose a mundane, consuetudinary word: "water," "fire," "air"... As you know, I have a passion for collecting lexicons. The collection is constantly expanding. In fact, these items have ended up pushing regular books out of the shelf. So, if I like what I find in the dictionary, there is a fourth step: I wonder if I can part ways from this appealing item. I generally end up poorer after these types of exposure. In time, though, after I study the dictionary in detail, I come to terms with its shortcomings. For the term perfection, although defined in them, doesn't apply to their achievement.
VA: Indeed, Henri Meschonnic argues that "[Les] Dictionnaires [...] sont donc à merveille les lieux où lire entre lignes, où reconnaître, plus facilement qu'ailleurs, les conflits, les masquages des conflits, les clichés qui font l'album de famille d'une culture" [Dictionaries, [...] are the best examples of texts that one should read between the lines, where the conflicts, the hidden and ignored oppositions, the clichés that make up the family album of a culture can be detected more easily than anywhere else]. For a general dictionary to be successful commercially, do you think it must reflect the ideological values of the public that is supposed to buy it—not what is practiced, but what is seen as an ideal, a Norman Rockwell tableau of words, so-to-speak?
IS: Even if it attempted not to reflect that weltanschauung, it would inevitably do it. We're all prisoners of our own time and place.
VA: In the early 19th century, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, said that the first book of a nation is a dictionary of its language, but clearly he was not speaking about the chronology of events, as his statement is not borne out by facts he knew: the USA did not have its own dictionary—Webster's—until 1806, thirty years after it declared its independence from England in 1776. What, then, do you think de Volney meant?
IS: Much like Beowolf for the Saxons, the Kalevala for the Finns, the Niebelunglied for the Germans, and the Icelandic sagas, the dictionary serves the function of a foundational saga, although not about a mythical hero in his quest for order, but about a language in search of collective definition.
VA: In all general lexicons, there are endogenous definitions that issue from the weltanschauung of the dictionary compilers about themselves, and exogenous definitions written by the compilers about those outside their own culture. Henri Béjoint said that "dictionary" is a term with a wide extension and a complex intention. In your travels through dictionaries, what have you found about identity?
IS: Lexicons aren't only reductivistic. They are also outright xenophobic. Still, they serve a purpose: to define a people's universe.
VA: Let's tackle the thorny issue of prescriptivism versus descriptivism in dictionaries.
IS: There are, as you know, two types of lexicographic approaches: the descriptive and the prescriptive. In the former the dictionary is but a record of the ways of speech available in a certain time and space. In the latter the dictionary has a normative approach: it doesn't only offer users a bank of available voices but it announces what is correct and what isn't. In my rebellious spirit, I tend to admire the absurd authority projected in prescriptive lexicons. Their dream is to normalize a language, to make it proper. This, needless to say, is utopian. Having said that, I must stress the dialectical nature between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. One cannot exist without the other. Language without limits descends to chaos: grammar, syntax, spelling... these are all prescriptive activities. But when the limits are set in stone without any room to be innovative, language becomes stagnant. For languages, to survive, need to be in a state of constant mutation. They need to engage in a give-and-take, to borrow and improvise new terms, and offer terms to other languages. In my eyes this type of promiscuous relationship is fundamental to keeping a healthy metabolism. They cannot take too much, otherwise their essence vanishes. Nor can they give too much because they would disintegrate the languages that surround them. This process is intimately connected to movements like imperialism, globalization and colonialism. Imperial tongues like Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese conquered by erasing—or at least eclipsing—regional ways of communication. Nowadays imperialism might appear to be more subtle, though not less effective. English is not only the lingua franca of the present. It is also an imperial tongue. But it is a mistake to believe that it only lends words and doesn't borrow anything. In fact, English is constantly absorbing foreign terms. Actually, its survival for over a thousand years is the result of its admirable elasticity.
VA: You close Dictionary Days with a definition from Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues of 1881: Dictionary: Say of it: "It's only for ignoramuses!" Flaubert's dictionary has been labeled by Green as "a masterpiece of deflation" that picks away at the safe banalities of the 19th century French bourgeoisie. And there is, of course, Ambrose Bierce's cynical Devil's Dictionary of 1906. We might also add to this list Cheris Kramerae's and Paula Treichler's The Feminist Dictionary (1985) that defines "ability" as "ability is sexless." What do you make of word lists assuming dictionary forms?
IS: There is an essential difference between a lexicon and a word list. The first attempts to be comprehensive, covering every single aspect in a particular field, e.g., a dictionary of applied mechanics, a dictionary of fashion, a dictionary of Dostoievski's oeuvre, etc. Word lists are less ambitious, more arbitrary. Indeed, they are individual attempts to map out a person's temperamental inclinations. What I enjoy about these moody volumes is their unconcealed subjectivity. Standard dictionaries come to us surrounded with a clout of authority. Word lists don't presume to have any authority. Of course, the fact that the likes of Flaubert and Bierce produced them does give them muscle.
VA: What do you think of Adolfo Bioy Casares's Breve diccionario del argentino exquisito (1978)? By the way, it doesn't include the term mejicanada, which Argentines use to describe the act of stealing from smugglers—an excess of what is seen as Mexicanness.
IS: Every culture has authors who, tired of creating Works of imagination, sit down to decipher their own lexicon. In Spanish, I love Bioy Casares's dictionary and also like Camilo Josй Cela's Diccionario secreto (1969) on cant, the language of crime and prostitution.
VA: To Anatole France, the dictionary was the universe in alphabetical order. In defining it, Dr. Johnson, preferred an analogy based on Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism: 'Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none,' even if 'the best cannot be expected to go quite true.' This interests me enormously, for I always start my translation classes with this question to my students: What is a dictionary? Of course, I get the expected answers from smart-alecks: Museums of words I have to carry in my backpack to come to your class.
IS: One needs to reach a certain age to fall in love with dictionaries. While one is young, one approaches language uncritically, as a tool. It is only after one realizes that words are not only malleable but transient—just like us all—that our relationship with these artifacts becomes more complex. I'm able to trace, with frightening precision, the moment this change occurred in me. In Mexico I had access to different languages (Hebrew, Spanish, Yiddish, French, English...), but I didn't pay too much attention to their differences. Silla, kisé, chair—the fact that a single object could be described in various ways didn't much concern me. Somehow language and identity were not conflictive categories for me. It was not until after I immigrated to the United States, in the mid eighties, that I realized that language defines us in an encompassing way. Dictionaries, of course, are more than museums of words; they are fashion stores, too.
VA: How are dictionaries fashion stores?
IS: They contain relics but also neologisms. Plus, in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal return, users rediscover terms and infuse them with new meaning. This is done by the so-called "retro" people. I have in my personal library the first two volumes (A-G and H-O) of J.E. Lighter's Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a veritable lexicographic treasure-trove. Look at how words like "hot" and "mad" have changed meanings over the last 150 years.
VA: There is a quote attributed to Emperor Charles V that reads: "With ambassadors I speak in French, with the ladies in Italian, with God in Spanish, and with my horse in German." As you state it in On Borrowed Words, you speak four languages, are they all equally useful for expressing your fears, your desires, your innermost thoughts?
IS: Not at all. English is best for essays and lectures, Spanish for writing fiction and expressing emotion, Yiddish is unparalleled when it comes to offensive words, and Hebrew is perfect for etymological disquisitions.
VA: When you say that Spanish is best for fiction and emotion...
IS: I find Cervantes's tongue incredibly elastic and suitable to engage in day-dreaming.
VA: This makes me think of the extent to which lexicons are misogynistic. The Feminist Movement coined the term dicktionary arguing that whatever their intentions, dictionaries have functioned as linguistic legislators that perpetuate the stereotypes and prejudices of their male writers and editors, systematically rendering women invisible in their pages. This produced a number of dictionaries, such as the aforementioned The Feminist Dictionary (1985), which had a firm revisionist agenda. Then we also have works like The Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases (1991) compiled by a gaggle of journalists from a range of major American cities that warns against using words such as "community," for it implies a monolithic culture, or "articulate," for it can be considered offensive when referring to a minority. As Tom Lehrer put it: "In my days there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say girl." Should a lexicographer be allowed to re-write century-old history from contemporary viewpoints?
IS: It would be fascinating to study, in chronological fashion, the way the word "woman" has been defined by lexicographers from the 15th century to the present. My favorite definition, nevertheless, is in Spanish and comes from Sebastián de Covarrubias, whose Tesoro appeared in 1611 and was published under the aegis of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The first Spanish dictionary, however, was the Universal vocabulario en latín y en romance, published in 1490 by Alonso de Placencia. Next came Nebrija's Lexicon hoc est dictionarium ex sermone latino in hispaniensem and the following year he published Dictionarium latinum-hispanum. Even though in 1505 the Franciscan monk Pedro de Alcalá, making use of Nebrija's work, published his Vocabulario arábigo en letra castellana, the father of Spanish lexicography is considered to be Sebastián de Covarrubias. His Tesoro de la lengua española o castellana was used by the Real Academia Española as the prime source for the compilation of the Diccionario de Autoridades, which in turn became the Diccionario de la lengua española. In any case, Covarrubias writes about the word mujer: "Muchas cosas se pudieran decir de esta palabra; pero otros las dicen, y con más libertad de lo que sería razón." (Many things can be said of this word; but others say them, and with more freedom than reason allows.) Covarrubias then offers a long quote describing women for their lasciviousness. This is the only time in over 1,000 pages where the lexicographer refuses to define a word. Could it be because he is afraid to express his own wantonness?
VA:I came across the name Hester Lynch Piozzi, more widely known as Hester Lynch Thrale, Samuel Johnson's friend. I know that Johnson is a hero of yours, as is made clear in the chapter included in Dictionary Days in which he pays a posthumous visit to your home in Amherst.
IS: Johnson had a breakdown at the age of fifty-six. He was rescued by the Thrales, the distinguished Henry and his wife Hester Lynch Salisbury. Hester Lynch Piozzi (her second husband's name) wrote a couple of books on her famous friend, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, which came out in 1786, and Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, in 1788. She was a hostess that rescued Johnson and had a literary salon frequented by the likes of Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. But she was more than a hostess; she was a lexicographer—although this aspect of her career generated much criticism. She authored an etymological study called British Synonymy in 1794 and a 2-volume history of words known as Retrospection, published in 1801. Some critics have disregarded her oeuvre as imitative of Johnson's, no doubt an offensive, nearsighted approach. In the annals of English lexicography, Piozzi holds a secure place, especially as a female role model. She met James Boswell in 1768 and had a famously competitive relationship with him, among other things because both tried to capitalize on Johnson's fame as biographers, although Boswell took much too long to complete his own assessment of his mentor.
VA: The total number of words found in Shakespeare's collected works and sonnets is 15,000, and some of these are hapax legomena—words used only once in the history of the printed word—such as honorificabilitudinitatibus, which appears in Love's Labour's Lost, act V, scene I. Linguistic studies have shown that the average American high school graduate has a vocabulary of 60,000 words. Steven Pinker has dubbed it a tetrabardian vocabulary. What do you make of this discrepancy?
IS: I'm surprised by the size: 60,000? I read somewhere that the average American uses only 2,000 different words a day. Who is to know? These quantitative studies are nothing if not intellectual pleasers, designed to prove whatever theory the researchers have set out to explain. Does a person today in Avon, England, use a smaller or larger vocabulary than his counterpart in the same place at the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616? The answer, I suspect, is more. There are, after all, more words in the English language in the 21st century than at any previous time. This has nothing to do with wisdom. There is simply much more to know nowadays and more accumulated ways to express it.
VA: Alison, your wife, is a speech pathologist and you are a writer. It is an interesting merging of views on language sleeping in the same bed, and this must have an influence on your children, Josh and Isaiah. In the first chapter of Dictionary Days, Isaiah asks you whether words die.
IS: At home we make endless jokes on and around language. You say potato and I say potahto... My kids are always correcting my English. Or else, they make fun of my accent and explain to me idioms I'm unfamiliar with as a non-native speaker. Isaiah's question about the death of words intrigues me deeply. He wanted to know if there is a heaven where words might go. I told him there was: the dictionary.
VA: You and Alison chose to name your second-born son in honor of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, a political philosopher and the author of Two Concepts of Liberty, had Russian as his mother tongue and English as his adopted academic language. Both of these languages make a semantic distinction between "freedom" and "liberty." One of Berlin's maxims is "Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs." Why did Berlin choose "liberty" over "freedom"?
IS: According to the OED, "freedom" is the power or right to act, speak and think as one wishes without hindrance or restraint. It is the concern of the individual. "Liberty," on the other hand, approaches the same concept but from the societal view. It is a concept that affects people from the outside and structures their freedom. It is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, and political views. Wolves and lambs are free to act as they wish. As animals they are motivated by sheer instinct, but as humans we live within moral confines. Liberty for Christians should not be death to other religious groups. Isaiah Berlin explored the concept of negative freedom, e.g., not offensive, destructive freedom, but freedom within certain parameters. One might ask: is restricted freedom still freedom? The answer is an unquestionable 'yes': there is no such thing as unrestricted freedom. Freedom invariably takes place within what is possible. And in society what is possible and what is necessary need to go hand in hand.
VA: Anne Fadiman has said that Americans admire success while the British admire heroic failure. I quote: "Who but an Englishman, Lieutenant William Edward Parry, would have decided, on reaching western Greenland, to wave a flag painted with an olive branch in order to ensure a peaceful first encounter with the polar Eskimos, [sic] who not only had they never seen an olive branch but had never seen a tree? Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo [sic] colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen." What cultural traits do you see on the pages of the OED?
IS: Was it George Bernard Shaw who said that England and the United States are two countries separated by the same language? Language is only a conduit to express oneself. Culture is a much larger category. In the Mexico of my adolescence one often heard jokes about Argentines, who are supposed to have huge egos. These jokes were often cruel: How does an Argentine commit suicide? He climbs up his ego and jumps. Why are Argentines buried in caskets with holes in them? Worms can't stand them either. By the way, there was a plethora of jokes about Mexicans in Argentina. Why don't Argentines eat Mexican refried beans? They know how to cook them right the first time around. Between these two nations there was—and still is—much misunderstanding, as well as envy.
VA: The OED has been described as a dictionary for decoding literary texts. According to the Dictionary Society of North America, the writer it quotes the most is Shakespeare (32,886 quotes), then come Scott (15,499), Milton (11,967), and Chaucer (11,000). The bias toward literature is so strong that the OED contains literary hapaxes, and words of marginal importance used by these preferred writers are rarely omitted and are usually assigned main lemma status.
IS: From Dr. Johnson to the present, the British are a stuffy people. The goal of the OED was to legitimize the English language by calling attention to England's stellar literary tradition. As we move from words to graphic signs in our civilization—middle-class children today are raised on a hefty diet of DVDs—literary quotations appear useless. It is not improbable that in the not-so-distant future the OED will come out with a lexicon legitimized by movie references.
VA: The strongest criticisms leveled against Murray's OED (1928), were that its coverage of words native to North America was notably deficient, that words considered vulgar or taboo were not admitted, and that the vocabularies of science and technology, commerce and industry, were largely ignored.
IS: It is no secret that dictionaries are exclusive, not inclusive. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot avoid this shortcoming. After all, we're all prisoners of our own time and place. Plus, there is no denying in that each and every one of us approaches the world with a bias. Take James Murray, whose full name was James Augustus Henry Murray. He, whose patience, wisdom, and dedication made the first complete edition of the OED possible, was a Borgesean character. Simon Winchester succinctly described his life-long effort as wanting to tackle "the meaning of everything." His unrelenting appeal to readers for citations, the Spartan rigors of his Mill Hill Scriptorium, the overall fastidiousness with which he approached his endeavor are all admirable and without peer. But Murray still felt marginalized from academia, for the Oxford dons did not treat him as an equal. This, in part, was what made him decide to exclude commercial and technical terms from the fascicles he progressively produced. In his eyes, gentlemen did not talk about money, machines or business; gentlemen engaged in discourse about literature and ideas. Of course, contemporary bias in dictionary-making may be the result of an entity such as the Soviet Bureau, or, for that matter, of a monarch—such as Queen Victoria. The first edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (1911) is full of subjective definitions, and so is the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary up to its most recent edition, the 9th, in 2003. Such subjectivity, which John Algeo called the 'Johnsonian effect,' may now be more restrained, but is certainly not absent from modern dictionaries. Yet one could argue that those biases are no longer the result of individual idiosyncrasy, as they were in the times of Johnson, Emile Littré, Pierre Larrouse, and Noah Webster. Now the slants, the prejudices, are those of a team of compilers—an Academy.
VA: In the essay "Of Jews and Canons" (The Essential Ilan Stavans), you mention that after reading Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon you came across a review in amazon.com from a reader in Spain who said that Bloom's book was not a Western canon at all, but "an English language one." You say that in Dr. Johnson's times, which you have branded a "less skeptical age than ours," Truth, with a capital 'T,' was "undeniable and absolute." Based on these observations, is the OED part of the Western canon?
IS: Without a doubt the OED is an integral part of the Western Canon. It is a masterpiece of epic proportions, and its views of the universe permeate everything.
VA: Universe?
IS: Nothing is alien to it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921, said: "What can be said at all can be said clearly." Seven years later, James Murray proved Wittgenstein right.
VA: I came across in A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary, composed by Donna Lee Berg, a reference to a certain Marghanita Laski (1915-1988), a British writer and journalist who often wrote under the pseudonym of Sarah Russell..
IS: There are other female contributors too, among them Ms. E.F. Burton of Carlisle, who contributed 18,700 citations, and the sisters Edith and E. Perronet Thompson of Bath, who contributed 15,000 and are frequently acknowledged for their proof-reading efforts as well. And two of Murray's daughters, Rosfrith and Elsie, were important contributors, as was a daughter of editor Henry Bradley, whose name I have not been able to find and has perhaps been lost to history.
VA: What about Marghanita Laski?
IS: Although a professed atheist, she was a Marxist Jew from Manchester and the niece of Joseph Harold Laski, an Oxford alum who led the Labour Party between 1945 and 1946. Harold Laski taught political science at Yale and Harvard. Marghanita Laski has been the subject of some scholarship of late. She is the author of the book Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences, which, to some, is of the caliber of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. In the annals of lexicography, with her quarter of a million citations submitted—and all accepted, by the way—to the Supplement and the second edition of the OED, she stands as the supreme contributor, male or female, to the OED and is yet to receive the credit she deserves.
VA: In America, the tradition of "encyclopedicity" goes back at least as far as Noah Webster's A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) which had, among other things, tables of foreign currencies, ancient and modern weights and measures, a history of the world, Jewish, Greek and Roman calendars, and a complete list of all the post offices in the US. However, R. Bailey mentions an abridged edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary published not long after his death that includes weights and measures, a table of heathen deities, Archbishop Usher's history of the world with principal dates from the creation in 4004 B.C., and the market days in the principal towns of England and Wales.
IS: Johnson was always conscious of his stature. He understood his role as pathfinder.
VA: Yes, but would he have objected to these appendices or, more to the point, to the nature of these particular appendices?
IS: He would have, for sure. Johnson loved straight-forward language. The circumvolutions, academicisms, and metaliterary devices we're accustomed to would have driven him out of his mind.
VA: You have a meditation on him in Dictionary Days in which you imagine Johnson visiting you at your Amherst home to discuss lexicography.
IS: Have you ever been asked: "if you had to choose a luminary from the past to have a conversation with, who would it be?" Samuel Johnson is one of the most verbally sensitive, intellectually lucid minds ever to walk this Earth. I cherish his words like jewels. I have a solid collection of his oeuvre in my personal library. It sits next to my Don Quixotes and to my multiple Borgeses.
VA: In 1893 the US Supreme Court used the dictionary to define "tomato" either as a fruit or vegetable in order to determine whether importing tomatoes was subject to tariff. It is worth noting that the word "dictionary" is often used in the singular, and with the definite article, as if there was only one dictionary per language, which would come in different formats and different types of presentation, but would contain the same information. But what is extraordinary is that in most court cases where dictionaries have been used as evidence, neither the title nor the exact nature of the dictionary used were disclosed. This has prompted Rosamund Moon to call this fictitious legal dictionary the UAD: The Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, a mythical object everyone uses yet no one ever sees. You have coined the term logotheism. Similarly, in 1989 historical linguist John Algeo coined the term lexicographicolatry. How do these terms differ? And, if there is a logotheism, are dictionaries Scripture?
IS: Logotheism is a religious manifestation where words have center stage. Judaism and Christianity are logotheistic. Just think back on the first line of Mathew: "In the beginning was the word." The original term is logos. Also, kabbalists from Moisés de León to Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria envisioned the universe as created by G-d through words. For them words preceded nature. Words were the purveyor's layout, the master plan.
VA: The Bible has spawned an impressive number of dictionaries. Might we also say that dictionaries have spawned an impressive number of bibles?
IS: In my view, some dictionaries—like the OED—are bibles.
VA: Are they sacred?
IS: They surely are...
VA: As you discovered in Dictionary Days when you looked at the ignominious definitions of día in María Moliner and the Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE) of the Real Academia Española. The DRAE defines day as:"Tiempo que el Sol emplea en dar, aparentemente, una vuelta a la Tierra." (The time it takes the Sun to, apparently, circle the Earth.) and Moliner repeats the error albeit using slightly different words , lexicographers have always been accusing each other of plagiarism. In 1986 Fredric Dolezal suggested that rather than saying that dictionaries are the result of a sequence of clever and not so clever plagiarists, it would help if we indeed viewed the English Dictionary as a single text; then the different "authors" of the successive dictionaries would more felicitously be called "editors."
IS: That is a concept put forth by the 18th century thinker Emanuel Swedenborg and emphasized by Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Almighty is the sole Creator, whereas humans are mere scribes. By the way, María Moliner is among the most fascinating cases in the history of female lexicographers.
VA: How so?
IS: Moliner, who died in Madrid in 1981, was a housewife whose energy was committed to recording and cataloguing, by hand, the Spanish "usage." Thus the title Diccionario de uso del español. It was an extraordinary lexicon released in 1966-7, immediately applauded by the likes of Miguel Delibes and Gabriel García Márquez. The current edition contains more than 3,000 pages and is not only larger but, in my judgment, better that the DRAE put forth by the Spanish Academy. Who ever said housewives were wasted?
VA: In a polyglot dictionary published in Paris in 1548 by Pasquier Le Tellier, he included words for intimate functions of the human body—in eight languages! Even staid Dr. Johnson has a six-line poem (by Jonathan Swift) to illustrate "fart" in his dictionary: "to fart. To break wind behind. As when we gun discharge, Although the bore be ne're so large, Before the flame from muzzle burst, Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first, and then he spoke." In Dictionary Days you comment on the puritanical aspects of modern dictionaries. What have you found?
IS: That the prudishness is embarrassing. Take the word "fuck." For decades is has been the most used—and abused—monosyllabic term in the English language. Yet only when R.W. Burchfield, chief editor of the OED from 1971 to 1984, whose mission it was to register "offensive parlance" under the radar of the Oxford dons, that the expression made it to the lexicon. In my 1971 edition, for instance, it is absent, believe it or not.
VA: We cannot expect general-purpose monolingual dictionaries to be so all-encompassing that they turn into encyclopedias. However, when I read the definition of judío in the Diccionario de la lengua española (2003), and compare it to its definition of moro, I find marked differences in their treatment. The Jewish presence in the Iberian peninsula spans from the 2nd century CE through March 31, 1492—yet no mention of this 14-century presence or forced departure appears in the definition. In comparison, the Islamic presence spans 8 centuries, from 711 CE through the expulsion of the Mozárabes by Isabella on February 11th, 1502. The definition of moro, however, does include historical information regarding their arrival in Spain and their forced departure—although its historicity is not perfect, for, if we are to be precise, they were expelled in the 16th century, not in the 15th as stated in the definition. Do lexicographers (and in this case, the Real Academia proper) have special responsibilities when it comes to encyclopedicity regarding definitions pertaining to their own history?
IS: They surely have... A lexicon is a map of its nation's psyche. Lexicographers have a responsibility to describe historical tides.
VA: Ah, the Academy. Over the last few years you've clashed with the Real Academia. Jean Cocteau said: "The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed." What is the role of these institutions?
IS: Academies are designed to be the authority on language. The function of authority is complex, of course. It records and catalogues. But should it also prescribe? I believe in correctness but not when it is achieved through coercion or when it limits freedom.
VA: The Diccionario de la lengua (DRAE) released in 2003, because of its haphazard encyclopedicity and rudimentary scientificity, tells us that a pantera is the same as a leopardo. To my merriment, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate defines panther as "a. A leopard of a hypothetical exceptionally large fierce variety, b. A leopard of the black color phase, 2. Cougar; 3. Jaguar." Furthermore, both dictionaries refuse to tell us where we may encounter panthers, whether as panthers or dressed as leopards, cougars, or jaguars; rather irresponsible on their part. Unless, of course, the beasts' fierceness is indeed hypothetical, their size not worth mentioning, and that black phase they're going through, well, it is just a phase. When I asked the people of the Diccionario what a tinge was, they got angry at me, Ilan, and shouted: Gosh, woman, what a question! Everyone knows that a tinge is 'An owl that is stronger and larger than the common one' (Búho mayor y más fuerte que el común.) This definition brought to mind Kersey's New Dictionary (1702) where he defined "dog" as 'a beast' and his Dictionnarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), where he simply defines it as 'a well-known creature.' Lexicographers, it seems, have a very hard time defining animals. You've noticed quite a number of peculiarities in dictionary definitions of animals. What intrigued you about the OED's encyclopedicity when it comes to animals?
IS: The OED defines "zebra" as "a South African equine quadruped (Equus or Hippotigris Zebra), of whitish ground-colour striped all over with regular bars of black, inhabiting mountainous regions, and noted for its wildness and swiftness." But is it "whitish ground-colour" with black stripes or blackish-ground color with white stripes, as other dictionaries put it? It is all in the eye of the beholder. Yet that beholder is partial, subjective, biased... Is a white-based "equine" less threatening than a black-based one?
VA: If you were asked to produce the smallest virtual lexicon ever, a vademecum for the eternally busy reader of today, capable of being transported in a Palm Pilot, what would it contain?
IS: The vademecum (from the Latin "go with me," a word that originated in the 17th century) would list words whose definitions would change depending on the date you access it. That, I suspect, is the model of the lexicons of tomorrow: instantly mutating vocabularies.
VA: Would names change too?
IS: With a few exceptions, such as Collins, lexicons—unless expressly devoted to toponimy and onomastics—refuse to include names.
VA: Yet names are identity cards. For instance, when Alice asked "Must a name mean something?" Humpty Dumpty answered with a short laugh "Of course it must. My name means the shape I am—and a good, handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."
IS: Yes, names become things and vice versa, especially with people. People's characters are collapsed into Platonic categories instantly organized in our mind. Do all the Johns you know have something in common, to such degree that the word John becomes an archetype? The answer is yes, although subjectively. John for me is attached to slim, serious, blond, speckled individuals, who tend to be too formal. This is because I've synthesized all the Johns I've come across. The same with Jeremy, Brigitte, Antonio, and Olivia. Of course, every so often a John will break the pattern, which, of course, simply proves that such a pattern does exist. And my archetype of John will be different from yours because you've met Johns I'm unacquainted with and vice versa. Are all Alices like the Alice in Wonderland? Of course not, but Lewis Carroll's Alice predisposes us to find similes.
VA: Some horses, whether real or imagined, have made their mark in history. There's Robert E. Lee's Traveller, George Washington's Nelson, Alexander's Bucephalus; Don Quixote's Rocinante, Caligula's Incitatus, Napoleon's Marengo... But there's one that piques my curiosity: the Cid Campeador's Babieca. I don't know about you, but I picture Rodrigo as a macho de pelo en pecho riding a powerful stallion across the Spanish plains. What do you make of his horse's rather inane name?
IS: And let's not forget Bellerophon's Pegasus, Reinaldos of Montalván's Bayard and Ruggiero's Frontino. In any event, Babieca is an emblematic name and it has a curious mythological past. It isn't until the second Cantar of the Poema de Mío Cid that Babieca makes an appearance. Like the manuscript of Don Quixote, which Cervantes's narrator buys in Toledo and is supposedly in Arabic, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—the Campeador—acquires Babieca from the emir of Seville, although there are some legends that claim the horse was from León. Yakov Malkiel, whose philological work has opened our eyes to the Hebraic roots of medieval Iberian culture, suggested that Babieca is a nickname probably meaning "el baboso," a dumbo. The equivalent practice nowadays, I assume, might be found in the way car companies name their products: Cherokee, Explorer, Touareg, etc.
VA: In 2004, the British Council conducted a survey (it sampled 40,000) amongst English-language students in 46 countries and asked them what they thought were the most beautiful words in the English language. According to the results, non English-speakers voted the following 10 words as the most beautiful: [1] Mother, [2] Passion, [3] Smile, [4] Love, [5] Eternity, [6] Fantastic, [7] Destiny, [8] Freedom, [9] Liberty and [10] Tranquility. What do you think of this survey's responses?
IS: I find the list a cliché. Since there are no forty-six countries in the world where English is the English of daily activity, was the survey done among non-English speakers? That would explain the inclusion of words like "Passion," "Smile," and "Love." There is the fact that "Mother" is #1 but "Father" is absent altogether. Is this because "madre sólo hay una," as the Mexican saying goes, but anyone can be a father? Then there is the difference, about which we've talked already in reference to Isaiah Berlin, between "freedom" and "liberty." The inclusion of these two terms on the list is especially conspicuous, since few languages outside of Russian, Polish, English—and perhaps Hebrew—make a distinction between these two concepts. And what is the adjective "Fantastic" doing in the list? And "Tranquility"? Is there a feminine aspect to the list, by the way? And are these "the most beautiful words in the English language" or are they the words about the most beautiful things in the language? I suspect it's the latter. In terms of beautiful words, I vote for "moon," "wolverine," "anaphora" and "precocious."
VA: Regarding "love," you mentioned in Dictionary Days that Acadians, Caldeans, Phoenicians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Normans, Toltecs, Vikings, and Quechuas didn't have a word for it. Knowing that images are an important part of how you see the world, what would you have done had you been born speaking Latin, that according to linguists doesn't have a lexeme for gray or brown, or born to that of the Dani of New Guinea, whose only color words are for black and white, or speaking a 4-color language like Hanunóo that has words only for black, white, green and red?
IS: The limits of our language are the limits of our worldview.
VA: In Dictionary Days you state that there are English words you dislike, amongst them "here" and "now." Yet, terms pertaining to space and time are ubiquitous in English, our borrowed language, because the culture of which we now partake measures its history in timelines and timeframes, its pace in New York minutes, its inventorying in FIFO or LIFO, its production line must run like clockwork, its products delivered in just-in-time and time-to-market frameworks, its manpower is measured in man-hours and clock-hours, its academics in credit-hours... and we all live under the pressure of deadlines and due dates and such. In short, we live by the here and now and the don't-be-late-tomorrows. How have you managed to avoid the "heres" and "nows" in your writing when most of your writing is in English?
IS: My strategy has been to let the reader infer these words. The act of reading takes place in an eternal present. Why re-emphasize the time frame in the text? Now that I'm thinking about it, my allergy to these coordinates might be linked to the obsession with them by the Mexican middle class: when people are anxious about their economic and cultural status, they stress the need to enjoy the "here and now," which is what I used to hear, among relatives and friends, all the time. I, for one, don't want to limit my bet to the present. The past and the future are far more important tenses for me.
VA: A few years ago I learned a lovely word, "noumenon."
IS: It comes from Kantian philosophy and implies the impossibility of knowing things as they actually are, for they are not experienced through any of the five senses. Human experience filters everything, and in so doing, it perverts the universe. But that perversion is who we are and, as such, is beautiful.
VA: Love, for instance, is a noumenon, yet its name is absent in many languages. You have a beautiful chapter in Dictionary Days about the definition of "love" in Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, and English dictionaries. By the way, do you like the world "beautiful"?
IS: Not particularly.
VA: Having talked about English words that you dislike, I would now like to bring up Spanish words that you're fond of. In particular, I've noticed you attraction to "rascuache" and "rascuachismo."
IS: These words denote taste as it is defined by class. "Rascuache" is an esthetic experience filtered through the eyes of the have-nots. If everything we do is defined by who we are, class—along with religion, politics, and ethnicity—is one of the circumstances shaping our worldview. I fell in love with the concept of "Rascuache" when I moved to the United States, in the mid eighties, and quickly found out that "lo mexicano," things Mexican, were considered, in the cultural arena, of low quality. Yet I was shaped by this weltanschauung. Was I therefore inferior? "Rascuachismo," it follows, is a political stand through which the have-nots affirm their worldview. The have-nots often suffer from an inferiority complex but only in the eyes of the cultural elite. Their life, in their own perception, is meaningful.
VA: A few days ago, my doorbell rang. When I picked up the intercom and asked "Who is it?," I got a very Mexican response: "No, si no es nadie, Vero, nomás soy yo." (No, it's no one, Vero, it's just me). I noticed that in Dictionary Days you mention the word donnadie: a nobody. And then there is another Mexicanism: ningunear.
IS: A verb denoting the act—and art—of turning someone into a nobody. Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude, makes a deal out of this lack of self. Yet does it mean that Mexicans have no self-esteem? Only when people from opposing social statuses interact does it come into play. I have never heard a poor Mexican saying "no soy nadie" to a peer. Needless to say, the behavior is universal: I've seen Italians, French, and Germans ningunearse, ignoring or making less of one another. In the Middle East, it is a most common activity: Jews giving the back to Palestinians and vice versa. It is sheer Mexican genius to have come with a term for it: ningunear. Another Mexicanism I adore is engentar, to over-saturate oneself with people, i.e., to be "peopled out."
VA: Bartlett's Roget Thesaurus, published in 1996, within is conceptual categories of synonyms, includes many lists of types of things, among them a lengthy list of phobias. Interestingly, there is "logophobia," but there isn't a phobia listed for fearing dictionaries.
IS: Should it be called "lexicophobia"?
VA: Have you ever come across someone suffering from it?
IS: Oh, thousands and thousands. How often does one come across a student who thinks looking up a term in the dictionary is a form of torture? Maybe we should establish a jail system in which inmates are forced to memorize definitions from dictionaries. Depending on the severity of the crime, one would need to memorize 2,000, 50,000, 100,000.
VA: In your essay "Gladys," part of Dictionary Days, you mentioned a gift you gave to the Salvadoran immigrant that is your protagonist.
IS: It was a pocket-size dictionary.
VA: Did she appreciate it?
IS: Lexicons for Gladys are objects from outer space. She didn't even complete 3rd grade. But as a self-taught woman with little time to spare, she tries to compensate for her limited knowledge with spontaneous efforts at reading. Last time I saw the dictionary, it looked as if it was in constant use...
VA: Even though the first thing she looked for in it was her name and couldn't find it?
IS: Her effort reminded me of a scene in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" in which the female protagonist, also uneducated, is shown a portion of a map to explain where someone she loves has moved to. What does the protagonist do? She looks for the actual person in the map.
VA: At the Primer Congreso Internacional de la Lengua in Zacatecas in 1997, Gabriel García Márquez caused a ruckus when he proposed simplifying Spanish orthography. There have been numerous proposals to do the same to English spelling, and there is even a Simplified Spelling Society in the United States. German-speaking countries signed an agreement in 1996 for a major spelling reform, and a new recommended orthography, albeit limited, has been adopted by Belgium, France and Quebec. What are your views on spelling reform?
IS: Even though orthography is somehow an invitation to look at words from a historical perspective—to trace their etymology—I'm in favor of spelling reform, particularly in Spanish. Andrés Bello, the Antonio de Nebrija of the Americas and one of the most illustrious thinkers in the Hispanic world, made a solid orthographic proposal in the 19th century, but only a minuscule fraction of his recommendations were implemented. Diacritics, the difference between s, c, and z, as well as b and v, the silent h, are in need of reexamination. Globalism should be an invitation to look at language anew. The use of language in the Internet, in particular, begs for simplification. But simplification should not be confused with stupidity: to simplify an orthography isn't the same as designing a language for idiots only.
VA: Riddling is an intellectual game that is found in many cultures, in all continents and throughout history. But riddling is not universal. Pukapuka is the most isolated island in the Cooks group and was immortalized by the American writer Robert Dean Frisbie in his books The Book of Puka Puka and The Island of Desire. But, according to linguist David Crystal, in Pukapuka and in Manus in the Admiralty Islands, you would not be able to play Lotería. Neither could you play it with the Miao of China. What attracted you to explore riddling?
IS: Riddles and tongue-twisters are favorite pastimes of mine. I'm not a poet but I love building these linguistic structures, among other reasons because they allow us to be challenged by randomness. The lotería is a game of random and language, which, although standardized, is also defined by randomness: what we say and how we say it is decided by the climate, the time of day, our mood... Isaiah, my eight-year-old, recited this tongue-twister yesterday:
Whether the weather is fine,
or whether the weather is not.
Whether the weather is cold,
or whether the weather is hot.
We weather the weather,
whatever the weather,
whether we like it or not.
VA: What is your favorite tongue-twister in Spanish?
IS: How about this one?
Si tu gusto gustara del gusto
que gusta mi gusto,
mi gusto gustaría del gusto
que gusta tu gusto.
Pero como tu gusto
no gusta del gusto
que gusta mi gusto,
mi gusto no gusta del gusto
que gusta tu gusto.
VA: What linguistic internal resources do you think monolingual people must tap in order to express the multiple aspects of their personality?
IS: Monolinguals are imprisoned in a single-channeled existence. Imagine having a radio capable of broadcasting only a single channel. Or else, buying clothes at a store selling only black garments.
VA: Living in two or more cultures, two or more languages, produces some rifts and upheavals; it requires a constant rearranging of schemata. According to Eliezer Nowodworski, among those who attempt to overcome this cultural schizophrenia, even make money out of it, are translators. Nowodworski is fond of saying that translation is neither a profession nor a trade, not even a calling, but rather a pathology. You have written extensively on life on the hyphen in The Essential Ilan Stavans. In the same volume you also have essays on translation per se. Is translation a pathology?
IS: I wouldn't describe it as such. Translation is an essential human activity, older than the archetypical Tower of Babel. In the Bible, the moment G-d communicates with Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:1, an act of translation takes place building a bridge between the "lashon ha-koddesh," the divine language, and the "lashon bnei adam," the language of humankind. Translation is everywhere: on the movie screen, in the classroom, in the doctor's office, among lovers... Of course, translators are prone to become obsessed with their endeavor. But there is most joy, even spontaneity, in the activity. Furthermore, translation always involves wonderment and surprise: what is the speaker really saying? Is there a way to convey the message in my own language? Is it possible to avoid becoming a falsifier? The answer to the last question, obviously, is no. Every translation is a misrepresentation.
VA: In 1963 Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God became a national best-seller with over a million copies sold. Robinson argued that theologians, when speaking about God, use terminology that distances God from the believers. He questioned the tradition of using either highly abstract and mystical terms such as Infinite One, The Unknowable, and crude spatial metaphors as if He were up there or out there. The book argued that, to contemporary audiences, such language was outmoded. Several experiments in religious communication followed the publication of his book and a new academic discipline, theographyё was proposed. Its aim was to 'draw a map' of the language that people use to talk about God. Is this proposed theography an academic utopia, or is it a dystopia? As Nowodworski has phrased it, would the concept of God, in a place like New York City—with its plurality of languages and creeds—be the same in Washington Heights, in The Village or in Murray Hill?
IS: Isaac Luria, a kabbalist in Safed in the 16th century, said that all names for the divine are subterfuges. For G-d is beyond human language. But, of course, what other recourse do we have to address the higher powers that surround and overwhelm us other than our imperfect human language? And human languages are shaped by their users. So the divine in Bombay, Lublin and San José is different as is Its appellation.
VA: Thank you, Ilan, for your thoughts on words and words on thoughts, as well as for the riddles, the risas and the rippling ride.
© 2005 by Verónica Albin and Ilan Stavans.
Acknowledgments
To my friend Gabe Bokor, obrigada, Gabinho, for your unwavering support throughout the years. Gracias, Martín Felipe Yriart (Madrid), journalist and wonderful friend, for trying to keep me from lecturing instead of questioning. If you did not always succeed, it is because I'm stubborn and impossible. To my translator friend Eliezer Nowodworski (Israel), my heartfelt todah for walking me through many interesting paths while preparing this interview.
Suggested Reading
Bailey, R.W. (Ed.) (1990) Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of our Language. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press).
Béjoint, H. (1994) Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Berg, D. L. (1993) A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary: The Essential Companion and User's Guide. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Comrie, B. (Ed.) (1990) The World's Major Languages. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Córdoba Rodríguez, F (2003) Bibliografía temática de la lexicografía. http://www.udc.es/grupos/lexicografia/bibliografia.htm
Crystal, D. (1991) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Fadiman, A. (1998) Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Green, J. (1996) Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. (New York: Henry Holt).
Landau, S.I. (2001, 2nd Ed.) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
McMorris, J. (2001) The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Murray, E. K. M. (1977) Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press)
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. (New York: HarperCollins).
Reddick, A. (1996). The Making of Johnson's Dictionary. (Melbourn: Press Syndicate of the U. of Cambridge)
Stavans, I. (2005) Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion. (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf).
______ and Villegas, T. (2004) ЎLotería! (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
______ and Sokol, N. (2004) Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
______. (2001) On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (New York: Penguin).
______. (2000) The Essential Ilan Stavans. (New York: Routledge).
Winchester, S. (2004) The Meaning of Everything (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press)
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article479.htm
IS: The use of standardized symbols to communicate in a structured and consistent fashion.
VA: Standardized symbols?
IS: Sounds make words and words are symbols. By circumscribing the sounds PE-YO-TE to the small, soft, thornless, blue-and-green cactus found in Mexico and in the Southwestern United States, society attaches a name to the object. The name represents the object and stands in its stead. Objects have specific words attached. This specificity is crucial, for if the cactus changed every minute, language would defeat its own purpose. It would be shaped by chaos.
VA: A dictionary, then, is a catalogue of symbols...
Ilan Stavans IS: ...pertaining to a specific group of people.
VA: Jean Cocteau once quipped that even the greatest masterpieces of literature are nothing but a dictionary out of order.
IS: Yes, the whole of Catcher in the Rye is in the Oxford English Dictionary, ready to be unscrambled. Similarly, one could argue that a dictionary is a narrative in a state of fragmentation. Or else, in discombobulated format.
VA: Lovely word, discombobulated. It is the kind of gem we call in Spanish a pentavocálica, for it has all five vowels. But going back to "dictionary," Thomas Aquinas warned us to "Beware the man of one book." Does this maxim apply to dictionaries?
IS: Lexicons are most dangerous artifacts: they surreptitiously get under our skin, influencing every thought we have, every aspect of culture we engage in. Yet, I'm in awe at the sheer courage they distill. Any attempt to catalogue an entire language is a quixotic effort.
VA: You called lexicons "artifacts."
IS: An "artifact" is an object crafted by humans, usually of cultural or historical interest. I like the familiarity the word has with "artifice," which denotes cleverness. Lexicons are also artifices in that they are cunning devices used to trick or deceive people. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language of 1755, calls attention to the Latin root for "dictionary," dictionarium, then states: "A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning." And he quotes from Brown's Vulgar Errours: "That there is an Art, which without compact commandeth the powers of Hell; whence some have delivered the polity of spirits, and left an account even to their Provincial Dominions: that they stand in awe of Charms, Spels, and Conjurations; that he is afraid of letters and characters, of notes and dashes, which set together do signifie nothing, not only in the dictionary of man, but the subtiler vocabulary of Satan."
VA: One of my favorite etymologies is that of "intellect." According to the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1991), it is derived from the Latin root intelligere: 'to perceive, to choose between.' This is a compound verb formed by the prefix inter- 'between' and legere: 'gather, choose, read.' Thus, "intellect" means being able to read between the lines. Do you have a favorite etymology?
IS: The word "persona," which in Latin means mask. It was also used to describe the character played on stage by an actor. Over time "persona" has come to be understood as the part of one's character in display for others. This was used in contrast with "anima," a reference to the soul. (In Spanish there is also the noun duende, used, among others, by Federico García Lorca.) Thus, "personable" means sociable, possessing a pleasant demeanor. And the endless variations: personal, personality, personate, personhood. In Anglo-Saxon, there are the synonyms "people" and "persons." In Romance languages, a "persona"—a gorgeous word, by the way—is an individual.
VA: The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. In Emerson's words, "Language is fossil poetry." Oliver Wendell Holmes conveyed a similar idea when he defined "word" as the skin of a living thought and said that whenever he felt like reading poetry, he would read his dictionary. How would you define "word"?
IS: Words are the fabric we use to dress our thoughts.
VA: You suggest in your book Dictionary Days that each culture has the dictionaries it deserves, which echoes Gandhi's opinion that every man at fifty wears the face that he deserves. You added that dictionaries are like mirrors, and, as such, are a reflection of the people that produced and consumed them. Yet Jonathon Green, in Chasing the Sun, argued that of the two most influential lexicographers in the US and England, Noah Webster and Dr. Johnson, respectively, the former gives his readers a low church, Republican view of the world whereas the latter gives his readers an Anglican, Tory worldview. Green further claims that what both men were doing, although neither articulated it as such, was playing God—or, if not God, at least Moses descending from the Sinai with the Tablets of the Law. If dictionaries are indeed written by a theocracy, if they are canonical and have authority, do they truly reflect the wants of the consumer, as you claim they do?
IS: Playing G-d is a common attitude... Every artist and intellectual, regardless of talent, engages in it. The ultimate yet impossible dream of the human mind is to explain and codify the universe. The result must be legible to others. This means the piece produced has to please others—in mercantile terms, it needs to be "consumed." No lexicographer lives on an island: the data collected comes from the people and it goes back to them.
VA: Mark Twain quipped that in German a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. In French, "vagina" is masculine; in Italian, "flower" is masculine. Germany is a Fatherland while Russia is a Motherland. Furthermore, in Spanish we have issues of size and worth happening conceptually when we juxtapose certain nouns with gender desinences like barco/barca and charco/charca. Of the languages you speak, which is the most idiosyncratic and why?
IS: Each language has its own idiosyncrasy. This is because languages are shaped out of spontaneous historical changes, not in a laboratory. The reason why Esperanto, the 19th century "rational" language created by the linguist L.L. Zamenhof of Warsaw, Poland (part of Russia when he was active), and known today as "the language for the global village" (doesn't English now fulfill that role?), is so predictive is that it is genetically engineered, so to speak. With its 28 letters, it has little by way of surprise. Personally, I love gender desinences in Romance languages: el sexo is masculine but la sexualidad is feminine. This is telling, isn't it?
VA: When you come across a newly published dictionary in a store, or one in somebody's shelves, what crosses your mind?
IS: First, I must say I marvel at its sheer existence. I ask: Is this yet another attempt at cataloguing human language? How is this item different from any other? Might it be closer to perfection? Second, I browse through its pages, caressing them, jumping from one definition to another. My mind sets on a somewhat exotic target: what about the word "percolate"? Or else, "numismatic"? Third, I choose a mundane, consuetudinary word: "water," "fire," "air"... As you know, I have a passion for collecting lexicons. The collection is constantly expanding. In fact, these items have ended up pushing regular books out of the shelf. So, if I like what I find in the dictionary, there is a fourth step: I wonder if I can part ways from this appealing item. I generally end up poorer after these types of exposure. In time, though, after I study the dictionary in detail, I come to terms with its shortcomings. For the term perfection, although defined in them, doesn't apply to their achievement.
VA: Indeed, Henri Meschonnic argues that "[Les] Dictionnaires [...] sont donc à merveille les lieux où lire entre lignes, où reconnaître, plus facilement qu'ailleurs, les conflits, les masquages des conflits, les clichés qui font l'album de famille d'une culture" [Dictionaries, [...] are the best examples of texts that one should read between the lines, where the conflicts, the hidden and ignored oppositions, the clichés that make up the family album of a culture can be detected more easily than anywhere else]. For a general dictionary to be successful commercially, do you think it must reflect the ideological values of the public that is supposed to buy it—not what is practiced, but what is seen as an ideal, a Norman Rockwell tableau of words, so-to-speak?
IS: Even if it attempted not to reflect that weltanschauung, it would inevitably do it. We're all prisoners of our own time and place.
VA: In the early 19th century, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, said that the first book of a nation is a dictionary of its language, but clearly he was not speaking about the chronology of events, as his statement is not borne out by facts he knew: the USA did not have its own dictionary—Webster's—until 1806, thirty years after it declared its independence from England in 1776. What, then, do you think de Volney meant?
IS: Much like Beowolf for the Saxons, the Kalevala for the Finns, the Niebelunglied for the Germans, and the Icelandic sagas, the dictionary serves the function of a foundational saga, although not about a mythical hero in his quest for order, but about a language in search of collective definition.
VA: In all general lexicons, there are endogenous definitions that issue from the weltanschauung of the dictionary compilers about themselves, and exogenous definitions written by the compilers about those outside their own culture. Henri Béjoint said that "dictionary" is a term with a wide extension and a complex intention. In your travels through dictionaries, what have you found about identity?
IS: Lexicons aren't only reductivistic. They are also outright xenophobic. Still, they serve a purpose: to define a people's universe.
VA: Let's tackle the thorny issue of prescriptivism versus descriptivism in dictionaries.
IS: There are, as you know, two types of lexicographic approaches: the descriptive and the prescriptive. In the former the dictionary is but a record of the ways of speech available in a certain time and space. In the latter the dictionary has a normative approach: it doesn't only offer users a bank of available voices but it announces what is correct and what isn't. In my rebellious spirit, I tend to admire the absurd authority projected in prescriptive lexicons. Their dream is to normalize a language, to make it proper. This, needless to say, is utopian. Having said that, I must stress the dialectical nature between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. One cannot exist without the other. Language without limits descends to chaos: grammar, syntax, spelling... these are all prescriptive activities. But when the limits are set in stone without any room to be innovative, language becomes stagnant. For languages, to survive, need to be in a state of constant mutation. They need to engage in a give-and-take, to borrow and improvise new terms, and offer terms to other languages. In my eyes this type of promiscuous relationship is fundamental to keeping a healthy metabolism. They cannot take too much, otherwise their essence vanishes. Nor can they give too much because they would disintegrate the languages that surround them. This process is intimately connected to movements like imperialism, globalization and colonialism. Imperial tongues like Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese conquered by erasing—or at least eclipsing—regional ways of communication. Nowadays imperialism might appear to be more subtle, though not less effective. English is not only the lingua franca of the present. It is also an imperial tongue. But it is a mistake to believe that it only lends words and doesn't borrow anything. In fact, English is constantly absorbing foreign terms. Actually, its survival for over a thousand years is the result of its admirable elasticity.
VA: You close Dictionary Days with a definition from Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues of 1881: Dictionary: Say of it: "It's only for ignoramuses!" Flaubert's dictionary has been labeled by Green as "a masterpiece of deflation" that picks away at the safe banalities of the 19th century French bourgeoisie. And there is, of course, Ambrose Bierce's cynical Devil's Dictionary of 1906. We might also add to this list Cheris Kramerae's and Paula Treichler's The Feminist Dictionary (1985) that defines "ability" as "ability is sexless." What do you make of word lists assuming dictionary forms?
IS: There is an essential difference between a lexicon and a word list. The first attempts to be comprehensive, covering every single aspect in a particular field, e.g., a dictionary of applied mechanics, a dictionary of fashion, a dictionary of Dostoievski's oeuvre, etc. Word lists are less ambitious, more arbitrary. Indeed, they are individual attempts to map out a person's temperamental inclinations. What I enjoy about these moody volumes is their unconcealed subjectivity. Standard dictionaries come to us surrounded with a clout of authority. Word lists don't presume to have any authority. Of course, the fact that the likes of Flaubert and Bierce produced them does give them muscle.
VA: What do you think of Adolfo Bioy Casares's Breve diccionario del argentino exquisito (1978)? By the way, it doesn't include the term mejicanada, which Argentines use to describe the act of stealing from smugglers—an excess of what is seen as Mexicanness.
IS: Every culture has authors who, tired of creating Works of imagination, sit down to decipher their own lexicon. In Spanish, I love Bioy Casares's dictionary and also like Camilo Josй Cela's Diccionario secreto (1969) on cant, the language of crime and prostitution.
VA: To Anatole France, the dictionary was the universe in alphabetical order. In defining it, Dr. Johnson, preferred an analogy based on Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism: 'Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none,' even if 'the best cannot be expected to go quite true.' This interests me enormously, for I always start my translation classes with this question to my students: What is a dictionary? Of course, I get the expected answers from smart-alecks: Museums of words I have to carry in my backpack to come to your class.
IS: One needs to reach a certain age to fall in love with dictionaries. While one is young, one approaches language uncritically, as a tool. It is only after one realizes that words are not only malleable but transient—just like us all—that our relationship with these artifacts becomes more complex. I'm able to trace, with frightening precision, the moment this change occurred in me. In Mexico I had access to different languages (Hebrew, Spanish, Yiddish, French, English...), but I didn't pay too much attention to their differences. Silla, kisé, chair—the fact that a single object could be described in various ways didn't much concern me. Somehow language and identity were not conflictive categories for me. It was not until after I immigrated to the United States, in the mid eighties, that I realized that language defines us in an encompassing way. Dictionaries, of course, are more than museums of words; they are fashion stores, too.
VA: How are dictionaries fashion stores?
IS: They contain relics but also neologisms. Plus, in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal return, users rediscover terms and infuse them with new meaning. This is done by the so-called "retro" people. I have in my personal library the first two volumes (A-G and H-O) of J.E. Lighter's Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a veritable lexicographic treasure-trove. Look at how words like "hot" and "mad" have changed meanings over the last 150 years.
VA: There is a quote attributed to Emperor Charles V that reads: "With ambassadors I speak in French, with the ladies in Italian, with God in Spanish, and with my horse in German." As you state it in On Borrowed Words, you speak four languages, are they all equally useful for expressing your fears, your desires, your innermost thoughts?
IS: Not at all. English is best for essays and lectures, Spanish for writing fiction and expressing emotion, Yiddish is unparalleled when it comes to offensive words, and Hebrew is perfect for etymological disquisitions.
VA: When you say that Spanish is best for fiction and emotion...
IS: I find Cervantes's tongue incredibly elastic and suitable to engage in day-dreaming.
VA: This makes me think of the extent to which lexicons are misogynistic. The Feminist Movement coined the term dicktionary arguing that whatever their intentions, dictionaries have functioned as linguistic legislators that perpetuate the stereotypes and prejudices of their male writers and editors, systematically rendering women invisible in their pages. This produced a number of dictionaries, such as the aforementioned The Feminist Dictionary (1985), which had a firm revisionist agenda. Then we also have works like The Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases (1991) compiled by a gaggle of journalists from a range of major American cities that warns against using words such as "community," for it implies a monolithic culture, or "articulate," for it can be considered offensive when referring to a minority. As Tom Lehrer put it: "In my days there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say girl." Should a lexicographer be allowed to re-write century-old history from contemporary viewpoints?
IS: It would be fascinating to study, in chronological fashion, the way the word "woman" has been defined by lexicographers from the 15th century to the present. My favorite definition, nevertheless, is in Spanish and comes from Sebastián de Covarrubias, whose Tesoro appeared in 1611 and was published under the aegis of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The first Spanish dictionary, however, was the Universal vocabulario en latín y en romance, published in 1490 by Alonso de Placencia. Next came Nebrija's Lexicon hoc est dictionarium ex sermone latino in hispaniensem and the following year he published Dictionarium latinum-hispanum. Even though in 1505 the Franciscan monk Pedro de Alcalá, making use of Nebrija's work, published his Vocabulario arábigo en letra castellana, the father of Spanish lexicography is considered to be Sebastián de Covarrubias. His Tesoro de la lengua española o castellana was used by the Real Academia Española as the prime source for the compilation of the Diccionario de Autoridades, which in turn became the Diccionario de la lengua española. In any case, Covarrubias writes about the word mujer: "Muchas cosas se pudieran decir de esta palabra; pero otros las dicen, y con más libertad de lo que sería razón." (Many things can be said of this word; but others say them, and with more freedom than reason allows.) Covarrubias then offers a long quote describing women for their lasciviousness. This is the only time in over 1,000 pages where the lexicographer refuses to define a word. Could it be because he is afraid to express his own wantonness?
VA:I came across the name Hester Lynch Piozzi, more widely known as Hester Lynch Thrale, Samuel Johnson's friend. I know that Johnson is a hero of yours, as is made clear in the chapter included in Dictionary Days in which he pays a posthumous visit to your home in Amherst.
IS: Johnson had a breakdown at the age of fifty-six. He was rescued by the Thrales, the distinguished Henry and his wife Hester Lynch Salisbury. Hester Lynch Piozzi (her second husband's name) wrote a couple of books on her famous friend, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, which came out in 1786, and Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, in 1788. She was a hostess that rescued Johnson and had a literary salon frequented by the likes of Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. But she was more than a hostess; she was a lexicographer—although this aspect of her career generated much criticism. She authored an etymological study called British Synonymy in 1794 and a 2-volume history of words known as Retrospection, published in 1801. Some critics have disregarded her oeuvre as imitative of Johnson's, no doubt an offensive, nearsighted approach. In the annals of English lexicography, Piozzi holds a secure place, especially as a female role model. She met James Boswell in 1768 and had a famously competitive relationship with him, among other things because both tried to capitalize on Johnson's fame as biographers, although Boswell took much too long to complete his own assessment of his mentor.
VA: The total number of words found in Shakespeare's collected works and sonnets is 15,000, and some of these are hapax legomena—words used only once in the history of the printed word—such as honorificabilitudinitatibus, which appears in Love's Labour's Lost, act V, scene I. Linguistic studies have shown that the average American high school graduate has a vocabulary of 60,000 words. Steven Pinker has dubbed it a tetrabardian vocabulary. What do you make of this discrepancy?
IS: I'm surprised by the size: 60,000? I read somewhere that the average American uses only 2,000 different words a day. Who is to know? These quantitative studies are nothing if not intellectual pleasers, designed to prove whatever theory the researchers have set out to explain. Does a person today in Avon, England, use a smaller or larger vocabulary than his counterpart in the same place at the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616? The answer, I suspect, is more. There are, after all, more words in the English language in the 21st century than at any previous time. This has nothing to do with wisdom. There is simply much more to know nowadays and more accumulated ways to express it.
VA: Alison, your wife, is a speech pathologist and you are a writer. It is an interesting merging of views on language sleeping in the same bed, and this must have an influence on your children, Josh and Isaiah. In the first chapter of Dictionary Days, Isaiah asks you whether words die.
IS: At home we make endless jokes on and around language. You say potato and I say potahto... My kids are always correcting my English. Or else, they make fun of my accent and explain to me idioms I'm unfamiliar with as a non-native speaker. Isaiah's question about the death of words intrigues me deeply. He wanted to know if there is a heaven where words might go. I told him there was: the dictionary.
VA: You and Alison chose to name your second-born son in honor of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, a political philosopher and the author of Two Concepts of Liberty, had Russian as his mother tongue and English as his adopted academic language. Both of these languages make a semantic distinction between "freedom" and "liberty." One of Berlin's maxims is "Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs." Why did Berlin choose "liberty" over "freedom"?
IS: According to the OED, "freedom" is the power or right to act, speak and think as one wishes without hindrance or restraint. It is the concern of the individual. "Liberty," on the other hand, approaches the same concept but from the societal view. It is a concept that affects people from the outside and structures their freedom. It is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, and political views. Wolves and lambs are free to act as they wish. As animals they are motivated by sheer instinct, but as humans we live within moral confines. Liberty for Christians should not be death to other religious groups. Isaiah Berlin explored the concept of negative freedom, e.g., not offensive, destructive freedom, but freedom within certain parameters. One might ask: is restricted freedom still freedom? The answer is an unquestionable 'yes': there is no such thing as unrestricted freedom. Freedom invariably takes place within what is possible. And in society what is possible and what is necessary need to go hand in hand.
VA: Anne Fadiman has said that Americans admire success while the British admire heroic failure. I quote: "Who but an Englishman, Lieutenant William Edward Parry, would have decided, on reaching western Greenland, to wave a flag painted with an olive branch in order to ensure a peaceful first encounter with the polar Eskimos, [sic] who not only had they never seen an olive branch but had never seen a tree? Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo [sic] colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen." What cultural traits do you see on the pages of the OED?
IS: Was it George Bernard Shaw who said that England and the United States are two countries separated by the same language? Language is only a conduit to express oneself. Culture is a much larger category. In the Mexico of my adolescence one often heard jokes about Argentines, who are supposed to have huge egos. These jokes were often cruel: How does an Argentine commit suicide? He climbs up his ego and jumps. Why are Argentines buried in caskets with holes in them? Worms can't stand them either. By the way, there was a plethora of jokes about Mexicans in Argentina. Why don't Argentines eat Mexican refried beans? They know how to cook them right the first time around. Between these two nations there was—and still is—much misunderstanding, as well as envy.
VA: The OED has been described as a dictionary for decoding literary texts. According to the Dictionary Society of North America, the writer it quotes the most is Shakespeare (32,886 quotes), then come Scott (15,499), Milton (11,967), and Chaucer (11,000). The bias toward literature is so strong that the OED contains literary hapaxes, and words of marginal importance used by these preferred writers are rarely omitted and are usually assigned main lemma status.
IS: From Dr. Johnson to the present, the British are a stuffy people. The goal of the OED was to legitimize the English language by calling attention to England's stellar literary tradition. As we move from words to graphic signs in our civilization—middle-class children today are raised on a hefty diet of DVDs—literary quotations appear useless. It is not improbable that in the not-so-distant future the OED will come out with a lexicon legitimized by movie references.
VA: The strongest criticisms leveled against Murray's OED (1928), were that its coverage of words native to North America was notably deficient, that words considered vulgar or taboo were not admitted, and that the vocabularies of science and technology, commerce and industry, were largely ignored.
IS: It is no secret that dictionaries are exclusive, not inclusive. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot avoid this shortcoming. After all, we're all prisoners of our own time and place. Plus, there is no denying in that each and every one of us approaches the world with a bias. Take James Murray, whose full name was James Augustus Henry Murray. He, whose patience, wisdom, and dedication made the first complete edition of the OED possible, was a Borgesean character. Simon Winchester succinctly described his life-long effort as wanting to tackle "the meaning of everything." His unrelenting appeal to readers for citations, the Spartan rigors of his Mill Hill Scriptorium, the overall fastidiousness with which he approached his endeavor are all admirable and without peer. But Murray still felt marginalized from academia, for the Oxford dons did not treat him as an equal. This, in part, was what made him decide to exclude commercial and technical terms from the fascicles he progressively produced. In his eyes, gentlemen did not talk about money, machines or business; gentlemen engaged in discourse about literature and ideas. Of course, contemporary bias in dictionary-making may be the result of an entity such as the Soviet Bureau, or, for that matter, of a monarch—such as Queen Victoria. The first edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (1911) is full of subjective definitions, and so is the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary up to its most recent edition, the 9th, in 2003. Such subjectivity, which John Algeo called the 'Johnsonian effect,' may now be more restrained, but is certainly not absent from modern dictionaries. Yet one could argue that those biases are no longer the result of individual idiosyncrasy, as they were in the times of Johnson, Emile Littré, Pierre Larrouse, and Noah Webster. Now the slants, the prejudices, are those of a team of compilers—an Academy.
VA: In the essay "Of Jews and Canons" (The Essential Ilan Stavans), you mention that after reading Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon you came across a review in amazon.com from a reader in Spain who said that Bloom's book was not a Western canon at all, but "an English language one." You say that in Dr. Johnson's times, which you have branded a "less skeptical age than ours," Truth, with a capital 'T,' was "undeniable and absolute." Based on these observations, is the OED part of the Western canon?
IS: Without a doubt the OED is an integral part of the Western Canon. It is a masterpiece of epic proportions, and its views of the universe permeate everything.
VA: Universe?
IS: Nothing is alien to it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921, said: "What can be said at all can be said clearly." Seven years later, James Murray proved Wittgenstein right.
VA: I came across in A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary, composed by Donna Lee Berg, a reference to a certain Marghanita Laski (1915-1988), a British writer and journalist who often wrote under the pseudonym of Sarah Russell..
IS: There are other female contributors too, among them Ms. E.F. Burton of Carlisle, who contributed 18,700 citations, and the sisters Edith and E. Perronet Thompson of Bath, who contributed 15,000 and are frequently acknowledged for their proof-reading efforts as well. And two of Murray's daughters, Rosfrith and Elsie, were important contributors, as was a daughter of editor Henry Bradley, whose name I have not been able to find and has perhaps been lost to history.
VA: What about Marghanita Laski?
IS: Although a professed atheist, she was a Marxist Jew from Manchester and the niece of Joseph Harold Laski, an Oxford alum who led the Labour Party between 1945 and 1946. Harold Laski taught political science at Yale and Harvard. Marghanita Laski has been the subject of some scholarship of late. She is the author of the book Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences, which, to some, is of the caliber of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. In the annals of lexicography, with her quarter of a million citations submitted—and all accepted, by the way—to the Supplement and the second edition of the OED, she stands as the supreme contributor, male or female, to the OED and is yet to receive the credit she deserves.
VA: In America, the tradition of "encyclopedicity" goes back at least as far as Noah Webster's A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) which had, among other things, tables of foreign currencies, ancient and modern weights and measures, a history of the world, Jewish, Greek and Roman calendars, and a complete list of all the post offices in the US. However, R. Bailey mentions an abridged edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary published not long after his death that includes weights and measures, a table of heathen deities, Archbishop Usher's history of the world with principal dates from the creation in 4004 B.C., and the market days in the principal towns of England and Wales.
IS: Johnson was always conscious of his stature. He understood his role as pathfinder.
VA: Yes, but would he have objected to these appendices or, more to the point, to the nature of these particular appendices?
IS: He would have, for sure. Johnson loved straight-forward language. The circumvolutions, academicisms, and metaliterary devices we're accustomed to would have driven him out of his mind.
VA: You have a meditation on him in Dictionary Days in which you imagine Johnson visiting you at your Amherst home to discuss lexicography.
IS: Have you ever been asked: "if you had to choose a luminary from the past to have a conversation with, who would it be?" Samuel Johnson is one of the most verbally sensitive, intellectually lucid minds ever to walk this Earth. I cherish his words like jewels. I have a solid collection of his oeuvre in my personal library. It sits next to my Don Quixotes and to my multiple Borgeses.
VA: In 1893 the US Supreme Court used the dictionary to define "tomato" either as a fruit or vegetable in order to determine whether importing tomatoes was subject to tariff. It is worth noting that the word "dictionary" is often used in the singular, and with the definite article, as if there was only one dictionary per language, which would come in different formats and different types of presentation, but would contain the same information. But what is extraordinary is that in most court cases where dictionaries have been used as evidence, neither the title nor the exact nature of the dictionary used were disclosed. This has prompted Rosamund Moon to call this fictitious legal dictionary the UAD: The Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, a mythical object everyone uses yet no one ever sees. You have coined the term logotheism. Similarly, in 1989 historical linguist John Algeo coined the term lexicographicolatry. How do these terms differ? And, if there is a logotheism, are dictionaries Scripture?
IS: Logotheism is a religious manifestation where words have center stage. Judaism and Christianity are logotheistic. Just think back on the first line of Mathew: "In the beginning was the word." The original term is logos. Also, kabbalists from Moisés de León to Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria envisioned the universe as created by G-d through words. For them words preceded nature. Words were the purveyor's layout, the master plan.
VA: The Bible has spawned an impressive number of dictionaries. Might we also say that dictionaries have spawned an impressive number of bibles?
IS: In my view, some dictionaries—like the OED—are bibles.
VA: Are they sacred?
IS: They surely are...
VA: As you discovered in Dictionary Days when you looked at the ignominious definitions of día in María Moliner and the Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE) of the Real Academia Española. The DRAE defines day as:"Tiempo que el Sol emplea en dar, aparentemente, una vuelta a la Tierra." (The time it takes the Sun to, apparently, circle the Earth.) and Moliner repeats the error albeit using slightly different words , lexicographers have always been accusing each other of plagiarism. In 1986 Fredric Dolezal suggested that rather than saying that dictionaries are the result of a sequence of clever and not so clever plagiarists, it would help if we indeed viewed the English Dictionary as a single text; then the different "authors" of the successive dictionaries would more felicitously be called "editors."
IS: That is a concept put forth by the 18th century thinker Emanuel Swedenborg and emphasized by Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Almighty is the sole Creator, whereas humans are mere scribes. By the way, María Moliner is among the most fascinating cases in the history of female lexicographers.
VA: How so?
IS: Moliner, who died in Madrid in 1981, was a housewife whose energy was committed to recording and cataloguing, by hand, the Spanish "usage." Thus the title Diccionario de uso del español. It was an extraordinary lexicon released in 1966-7, immediately applauded by the likes of Miguel Delibes and Gabriel García Márquez. The current edition contains more than 3,000 pages and is not only larger but, in my judgment, better that the DRAE put forth by the Spanish Academy. Who ever said housewives were wasted?
VA: In a polyglot dictionary published in Paris in 1548 by Pasquier Le Tellier, he included words for intimate functions of the human body—in eight languages! Even staid Dr. Johnson has a six-line poem (by Jonathan Swift) to illustrate "fart" in his dictionary: "to fart. To break wind behind. As when we gun discharge, Although the bore be ne're so large, Before the flame from muzzle burst, Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first, and then he spoke." In Dictionary Days you comment on the puritanical aspects of modern dictionaries. What have you found?
IS: That the prudishness is embarrassing. Take the word "fuck." For decades is has been the most used—and abused—monosyllabic term in the English language. Yet only when R.W. Burchfield, chief editor of the OED from 1971 to 1984, whose mission it was to register "offensive parlance" under the radar of the Oxford dons, that the expression made it to the lexicon. In my 1971 edition, for instance, it is absent, believe it or not.
VA: We cannot expect general-purpose monolingual dictionaries to be so all-encompassing that they turn into encyclopedias. However, when I read the definition of judío in the Diccionario de la lengua española (2003), and compare it to its definition of moro, I find marked differences in their treatment. The Jewish presence in the Iberian peninsula spans from the 2nd century CE through March 31, 1492—yet no mention of this 14-century presence or forced departure appears in the definition. In comparison, the Islamic presence spans 8 centuries, from 711 CE through the expulsion of the Mozárabes by Isabella on February 11th, 1502. The definition of moro, however, does include historical information regarding their arrival in Spain and their forced departure—although its historicity is not perfect, for, if we are to be precise, they were expelled in the 16th century, not in the 15th as stated in the definition. Do lexicographers (and in this case, the Real Academia proper) have special responsibilities when it comes to encyclopedicity regarding definitions pertaining to their own history?
IS: They surely have... A lexicon is a map of its nation's psyche. Lexicographers have a responsibility to describe historical tides.
VA: Ah, the Academy. Over the last few years you've clashed with the Real Academia. Jean Cocteau said: "The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed." What is the role of these institutions?
IS: Academies are designed to be the authority on language. The function of authority is complex, of course. It records and catalogues. But should it also prescribe? I believe in correctness but not when it is achieved through coercion or when it limits freedom.
VA: The Diccionario de la lengua (DRAE) released in 2003, because of its haphazard encyclopedicity and rudimentary scientificity, tells us that a pantera is the same as a leopardo. To my merriment, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate defines panther as "a. A leopard of a hypothetical exceptionally large fierce variety, b. A leopard of the black color phase, 2. Cougar; 3. Jaguar." Furthermore, both dictionaries refuse to tell us where we may encounter panthers, whether as panthers or dressed as leopards, cougars, or jaguars; rather irresponsible on their part. Unless, of course, the beasts' fierceness is indeed hypothetical, their size not worth mentioning, and that black phase they're going through, well, it is just a phase. When I asked the people of the Diccionario what a tinge was, they got angry at me, Ilan, and shouted: Gosh, woman, what a question! Everyone knows that a tinge is 'An owl that is stronger and larger than the common one' (Búho mayor y más fuerte que el común.) This definition brought to mind Kersey's New Dictionary (1702) where he defined "dog" as 'a beast' and his Dictionnarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), where he simply defines it as 'a well-known creature.' Lexicographers, it seems, have a very hard time defining animals. You've noticed quite a number of peculiarities in dictionary definitions of animals. What intrigued you about the OED's encyclopedicity when it comes to animals?
IS: The OED defines "zebra" as "a South African equine quadruped (Equus or Hippotigris Zebra), of whitish ground-colour striped all over with regular bars of black, inhabiting mountainous regions, and noted for its wildness and swiftness." But is it "whitish ground-colour" with black stripes or blackish-ground color with white stripes, as other dictionaries put it? It is all in the eye of the beholder. Yet that beholder is partial, subjective, biased... Is a white-based "equine" less threatening than a black-based one?
VA: If you were asked to produce the smallest virtual lexicon ever, a vademecum for the eternally busy reader of today, capable of being transported in a Palm Pilot, what would it contain?
IS: The vademecum (from the Latin "go with me," a word that originated in the 17th century) would list words whose definitions would change depending on the date you access it. That, I suspect, is the model of the lexicons of tomorrow: instantly mutating vocabularies.
VA: Would names change too?
IS: With a few exceptions, such as Collins, lexicons—unless expressly devoted to toponimy and onomastics—refuse to include names.
VA: Yet names are identity cards. For instance, when Alice asked "Must a name mean something?" Humpty Dumpty answered with a short laugh "Of course it must. My name means the shape I am—and a good, handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."
IS: Yes, names become things and vice versa, especially with people. People's characters are collapsed into Platonic categories instantly organized in our mind. Do all the Johns you know have something in common, to such degree that the word John becomes an archetype? The answer is yes, although subjectively. John for me is attached to slim, serious, blond, speckled individuals, who tend to be too formal. This is because I've synthesized all the Johns I've come across. The same with Jeremy, Brigitte, Antonio, and Olivia. Of course, every so often a John will break the pattern, which, of course, simply proves that such a pattern does exist. And my archetype of John will be different from yours because you've met Johns I'm unacquainted with and vice versa. Are all Alices like the Alice in Wonderland? Of course not, but Lewis Carroll's Alice predisposes us to find similes.
VA: Some horses, whether real or imagined, have made their mark in history. There's Robert E. Lee's Traveller, George Washington's Nelson, Alexander's Bucephalus; Don Quixote's Rocinante, Caligula's Incitatus, Napoleon's Marengo... But there's one that piques my curiosity: the Cid Campeador's Babieca. I don't know about you, but I picture Rodrigo as a macho de pelo en pecho riding a powerful stallion across the Spanish plains. What do you make of his horse's rather inane name?
IS: And let's not forget Bellerophon's Pegasus, Reinaldos of Montalván's Bayard and Ruggiero's Frontino. In any event, Babieca is an emblematic name and it has a curious mythological past. It isn't until the second Cantar of the Poema de Mío Cid that Babieca makes an appearance. Like the manuscript of Don Quixote, which Cervantes's narrator buys in Toledo and is supposedly in Arabic, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—the Campeador—acquires Babieca from the emir of Seville, although there are some legends that claim the horse was from León. Yakov Malkiel, whose philological work has opened our eyes to the Hebraic roots of medieval Iberian culture, suggested that Babieca is a nickname probably meaning "el baboso," a dumbo. The equivalent practice nowadays, I assume, might be found in the way car companies name their products: Cherokee, Explorer, Touareg, etc.
VA: In 2004, the British Council conducted a survey (it sampled 40,000) amongst English-language students in 46 countries and asked them what they thought were the most beautiful words in the English language. According to the results, non English-speakers voted the following 10 words as the most beautiful: [1] Mother, [2] Passion, [3] Smile, [4] Love, [5] Eternity, [6] Fantastic, [7] Destiny, [8] Freedom, [9] Liberty and [10] Tranquility. What do you think of this survey's responses?
IS: I find the list a cliché. Since there are no forty-six countries in the world where English is the English of daily activity, was the survey done among non-English speakers? That would explain the inclusion of words like "Passion," "Smile," and "Love." There is the fact that "Mother" is #1 but "Father" is absent altogether. Is this because "madre sólo hay una," as the Mexican saying goes, but anyone can be a father? Then there is the difference, about which we've talked already in reference to Isaiah Berlin, between "freedom" and "liberty." The inclusion of these two terms on the list is especially conspicuous, since few languages outside of Russian, Polish, English—and perhaps Hebrew—make a distinction between these two concepts. And what is the adjective "Fantastic" doing in the list? And "Tranquility"? Is there a feminine aspect to the list, by the way? And are these "the most beautiful words in the English language" or are they the words about the most beautiful things in the language? I suspect it's the latter. In terms of beautiful words, I vote for "moon," "wolverine," "anaphora" and "precocious."
VA: Regarding "love," you mentioned in Dictionary Days that Acadians, Caldeans, Phoenicians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Normans, Toltecs, Vikings, and Quechuas didn't have a word for it. Knowing that images are an important part of how you see the world, what would you have done had you been born speaking Latin, that according to linguists doesn't have a lexeme for gray or brown, or born to that of the Dani of New Guinea, whose only color words are for black and white, or speaking a 4-color language like Hanunóo that has words only for black, white, green and red?
IS: The limits of our language are the limits of our worldview.
VA: In Dictionary Days you state that there are English words you dislike, amongst them "here" and "now." Yet, terms pertaining to space and time are ubiquitous in English, our borrowed language, because the culture of which we now partake measures its history in timelines and timeframes, its pace in New York minutes, its inventorying in FIFO or LIFO, its production line must run like clockwork, its products delivered in just-in-time and time-to-market frameworks, its manpower is measured in man-hours and clock-hours, its academics in credit-hours... and we all live under the pressure of deadlines and due dates and such. In short, we live by the here and now and the don't-be-late-tomorrows. How have you managed to avoid the "heres" and "nows" in your writing when most of your writing is in English?
IS: My strategy has been to let the reader infer these words. The act of reading takes place in an eternal present. Why re-emphasize the time frame in the text? Now that I'm thinking about it, my allergy to these coordinates might be linked to the obsession with them by the Mexican middle class: when people are anxious about their economic and cultural status, they stress the need to enjoy the "here and now," which is what I used to hear, among relatives and friends, all the time. I, for one, don't want to limit my bet to the present. The past and the future are far more important tenses for me.
VA: A few years ago I learned a lovely word, "noumenon."
IS: It comes from Kantian philosophy and implies the impossibility of knowing things as they actually are, for they are not experienced through any of the five senses. Human experience filters everything, and in so doing, it perverts the universe. But that perversion is who we are and, as such, is beautiful.
VA: Love, for instance, is a noumenon, yet its name is absent in many languages. You have a beautiful chapter in Dictionary Days about the definition of "love" in Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, and English dictionaries. By the way, do you like the world "beautiful"?
IS: Not particularly.
VA: Having talked about English words that you dislike, I would now like to bring up Spanish words that you're fond of. In particular, I've noticed you attraction to "rascuache" and "rascuachismo."
IS: These words denote taste as it is defined by class. "Rascuache" is an esthetic experience filtered through the eyes of the have-nots. If everything we do is defined by who we are, class—along with religion, politics, and ethnicity—is one of the circumstances shaping our worldview. I fell in love with the concept of "Rascuache" when I moved to the United States, in the mid eighties, and quickly found out that "lo mexicano," things Mexican, were considered, in the cultural arena, of low quality. Yet I was shaped by this weltanschauung. Was I therefore inferior? "Rascuachismo," it follows, is a political stand through which the have-nots affirm their worldview. The have-nots often suffer from an inferiority complex but only in the eyes of the cultural elite. Their life, in their own perception, is meaningful.
VA: A few days ago, my doorbell rang. When I picked up the intercom and asked "Who is it?," I got a very Mexican response: "No, si no es nadie, Vero, nomás soy yo." (No, it's no one, Vero, it's just me). I noticed that in Dictionary Days you mention the word donnadie: a nobody. And then there is another Mexicanism: ningunear.
IS: A verb denoting the act—and art—of turning someone into a nobody. Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude, makes a deal out of this lack of self. Yet does it mean that Mexicans have no self-esteem? Only when people from opposing social statuses interact does it come into play. I have never heard a poor Mexican saying "no soy nadie" to a peer. Needless to say, the behavior is universal: I've seen Italians, French, and Germans ningunearse, ignoring or making less of one another. In the Middle East, it is a most common activity: Jews giving the back to Palestinians and vice versa. It is sheer Mexican genius to have come with a term for it: ningunear. Another Mexicanism I adore is engentar, to over-saturate oneself with people, i.e., to be "peopled out."
VA: Bartlett's Roget Thesaurus, published in 1996, within is conceptual categories of synonyms, includes many lists of types of things, among them a lengthy list of phobias. Interestingly, there is "logophobia," but there isn't a phobia listed for fearing dictionaries.
IS: Should it be called "lexicophobia"?
VA: Have you ever come across someone suffering from it?
IS: Oh, thousands and thousands. How often does one come across a student who thinks looking up a term in the dictionary is a form of torture? Maybe we should establish a jail system in which inmates are forced to memorize definitions from dictionaries. Depending on the severity of the crime, one would need to memorize 2,000, 50,000, 100,000.
VA: In your essay "Gladys," part of Dictionary Days, you mentioned a gift you gave to the Salvadoran immigrant that is your protagonist.
IS: It was a pocket-size dictionary.
VA: Did she appreciate it?
IS: Lexicons for Gladys are objects from outer space. She didn't even complete 3rd grade. But as a self-taught woman with little time to spare, she tries to compensate for her limited knowledge with spontaneous efforts at reading. Last time I saw the dictionary, it looked as if it was in constant use...
VA: Even though the first thing she looked for in it was her name and couldn't find it?
IS: Her effort reminded me of a scene in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" in which the female protagonist, also uneducated, is shown a portion of a map to explain where someone she loves has moved to. What does the protagonist do? She looks for the actual person in the map.
VA: At the Primer Congreso Internacional de la Lengua in Zacatecas in 1997, Gabriel García Márquez caused a ruckus when he proposed simplifying Spanish orthography. There have been numerous proposals to do the same to English spelling, and there is even a Simplified Spelling Society in the United States. German-speaking countries signed an agreement in 1996 for a major spelling reform, and a new recommended orthography, albeit limited, has been adopted by Belgium, France and Quebec. What are your views on spelling reform?
IS: Even though orthography is somehow an invitation to look at words from a historical perspective—to trace their etymology—I'm in favor of spelling reform, particularly in Spanish. Andrés Bello, the Antonio de Nebrija of the Americas and one of the most illustrious thinkers in the Hispanic world, made a solid orthographic proposal in the 19th century, but only a minuscule fraction of his recommendations were implemented. Diacritics, the difference between s, c, and z, as well as b and v, the silent h, are in need of reexamination. Globalism should be an invitation to look at language anew. The use of language in the Internet, in particular, begs for simplification. But simplification should not be confused with stupidity: to simplify an orthography isn't the same as designing a language for idiots only.
VA: Riddling is an intellectual game that is found in many cultures, in all continents and throughout history. But riddling is not universal. Pukapuka is the most isolated island in the Cooks group and was immortalized by the American writer Robert Dean Frisbie in his books The Book of Puka Puka and The Island of Desire. But, according to linguist David Crystal, in Pukapuka and in Manus in the Admiralty Islands, you would not be able to play Lotería. Neither could you play it with the Miao of China. What attracted you to explore riddling?
IS: Riddles and tongue-twisters are favorite pastimes of mine. I'm not a poet but I love building these linguistic structures, among other reasons because they allow us to be challenged by randomness. The lotería is a game of random and language, which, although standardized, is also defined by randomness: what we say and how we say it is decided by the climate, the time of day, our mood... Isaiah, my eight-year-old, recited this tongue-twister yesterday:
Whether the weather is fine,
or whether the weather is not.
Whether the weather is cold,
or whether the weather is hot.
We weather the weather,
whatever the weather,
whether we like it or not.
VA: What is your favorite tongue-twister in Spanish?
IS: How about this one?
Si tu gusto gustara del gusto
que gusta mi gusto,
mi gusto gustaría del gusto
que gusta tu gusto.
Pero como tu gusto
no gusta del gusto
que gusta mi gusto,
mi gusto no gusta del gusto
que gusta tu gusto.
VA: What linguistic internal resources do you think monolingual people must tap in order to express the multiple aspects of their personality?
IS: Monolinguals are imprisoned in a single-channeled existence. Imagine having a radio capable of broadcasting only a single channel. Or else, buying clothes at a store selling only black garments.
VA: Living in two or more cultures, two or more languages, produces some rifts and upheavals; it requires a constant rearranging of schemata. According to Eliezer Nowodworski, among those who attempt to overcome this cultural schizophrenia, even make money out of it, are translators. Nowodworski is fond of saying that translation is neither a profession nor a trade, not even a calling, but rather a pathology. You have written extensively on life on the hyphen in The Essential Ilan Stavans. In the same volume you also have essays on translation per se. Is translation a pathology?
IS: I wouldn't describe it as such. Translation is an essential human activity, older than the archetypical Tower of Babel. In the Bible, the moment G-d communicates with Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:1, an act of translation takes place building a bridge between the "lashon ha-koddesh," the divine language, and the "lashon bnei adam," the language of humankind. Translation is everywhere: on the movie screen, in the classroom, in the doctor's office, among lovers... Of course, translators are prone to become obsessed with their endeavor. But there is most joy, even spontaneity, in the activity. Furthermore, translation always involves wonderment and surprise: what is the speaker really saying? Is there a way to convey the message in my own language? Is it possible to avoid becoming a falsifier? The answer to the last question, obviously, is no. Every translation is a misrepresentation.
VA: In 1963 Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God became a national best-seller with over a million copies sold. Robinson argued that theologians, when speaking about God, use terminology that distances God from the believers. He questioned the tradition of using either highly abstract and mystical terms such as Infinite One, The Unknowable, and crude spatial metaphors as if He were up there or out there. The book argued that, to contemporary audiences, such language was outmoded. Several experiments in religious communication followed the publication of his book and a new academic discipline, theographyё was proposed. Its aim was to 'draw a map' of the language that people use to talk about God. Is this proposed theography an academic utopia, or is it a dystopia? As Nowodworski has phrased it, would the concept of God, in a place like New York City—with its plurality of languages and creeds—be the same in Washington Heights, in The Village or in Murray Hill?
IS: Isaac Luria, a kabbalist in Safed in the 16th century, said that all names for the divine are subterfuges. For G-d is beyond human language. But, of course, what other recourse do we have to address the higher powers that surround and overwhelm us other than our imperfect human language? And human languages are shaped by their users. So the divine in Bombay, Lublin and San José is different as is Its appellation.
VA: Thank you, Ilan, for your thoughts on words and words on thoughts, as well as for the riddles, the risas and the rippling ride.
© 2005 by Verónica Albin and Ilan Stavans.
Acknowledgments
To my friend Gabe Bokor, obrigada, Gabinho, for your unwavering support throughout the years. Gracias, Martín Felipe Yriart (Madrid), journalist and wonderful friend, for trying to keep me from lecturing instead of questioning. If you did not always succeed, it is because I'm stubborn and impossible. To my translator friend Eliezer Nowodworski (Israel), my heartfelt todah for walking me through many interesting paths while preparing this interview.
Suggested Reading
Bailey, R.W. (Ed.) (1990) Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of our Language. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press).
Béjoint, H. (1994) Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Berg, D. L. (1993) A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary: The Essential Companion and User's Guide. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Comrie, B. (Ed.) (1990) The World's Major Languages. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Córdoba Rodríguez, F (2003) Bibliografía temática de la lexicografía. http://www.udc.es/grupos/lexicografia/bibliografia.htm
Crystal, D. (1991) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Fadiman, A. (1998) Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Green, J. (1996) Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. (New York: Henry Holt).
Landau, S.I. (2001, 2nd Ed.) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
McMorris, J. (2001) The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Murray, E. K. M. (1977) Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press)
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. (New York: HarperCollins).
Reddick, A. (1996). The Making of Johnson's Dictionary. (Melbourn: Press Syndicate of the U. of Cambridge)
Stavans, I. (2005) Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion. (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf).
______ and Villegas, T. (2004) ЎLotería! (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
______ and Sokol, N. (2004) Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
______. (2001) On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (New York: Penguin).
______. (2000) The Essential Ilan Stavans. (New York: Routledge).
Winchester, S. (2004) The Meaning of Everything (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press)
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article479.htm
Guaraní Dictionary
Concise Dictionary of Guaraní-English and English-Guaraní
Author: A. Scott Britton
Publisher: Hippocrene Books, Inc., New York
Copyright © 2005
ISBN: 0-77818-1066-3
240 pages, 120 pages with an estimated 3600 entries in each direction
Price printed on the back of the book: US$ 14.95 (available from major booksellers on the web at discounted price)
Robert CroeseThis paper-bound, small-sized (4 x 6 inches) booklet is one in a series of concise dictionaries published by Hippocrene Books, Inc. The inside cover lists 41 other dictionaries in print, including such mainstream languages as Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, etc., but also such esoteric languages as Gypsy, Ladino, Nahuatl, Twi and Zapotec (Isthmus). The back cover mentions other types of books published by Hippocrene Books, with such interesting topics as the culinary practices of various Latin American countries and a Dictionary and Phrasebook of Chilenismos. The last-named title lists at US$ 11.95.
The introduction to the dictionary states that "Guaraní, Avañe'ê to its speakers, is the language of over four million people in Paraguay and maintains and official status with Spanish in that country." This indigenous language pertains to the Tupi language family, members of which extend from the Peruvian rainforest and Bolivia to the west, throughout Brazil to the north and the east, and into Argentina to the south. Mary Ritchie Key (1997, 77) mentioned that:
"Perhaps the most famous member of [the Tupi family] is the Guaraní of Paraguay. It has captured the attention of sociolinguists, sociologists, and people in education, because of the bilingual nature of the country and the dominant position of Guaraní even among non-Indian speakers. It is said in Paraguay that 'Spanish comes from the Paraguayan mind; Guaraní springs from the heart.' (Gorham 1973: 1) This language has also provided a lingua franca for a large area in Brazil where travel and migrations were extensive."
According to the Ethnologue (12th Ed., Page 110), some three million people speak Guaraní in Paraguay, which is 95% of the population. Just over 50% of rural Paraguayans are monolingual in Guaraní.
There are two types of Guaraní language: The pure indigenous form and a mixed language spoken in and around Asunción, called Jopara, which, according to Britton (Page 3), is "more of a switching back and forth than a cohesive blend between Guaraní and Spanish."
I had high hopes that this dictionary might include useful phrases for learning some of the basics of Guaraní communication, but, unfortunately, the dictionary only consists of single lexical entries, identified by part of speech, and primarily glossed with one or two entries from the other language. All entries appear to be faithfully cross-referenced in the reverse dictionary. Verbs are only listed as v.r. (verb root), with no indication of verb conjugations.
I asked the publisher to be put in touch with Mr. Britton, the author of this dictionary (which didn't happen), so I could ask him a couple of simple questions: 1) What is the mission of this one-term basically one-meaning dictionary, and 2) what is the source of the word list or how was the material gathered? Unfortunately, I don't have the answers to these questions. The publisher did tell me, however, that Britton had also authored the Zapotec dictionary, and that he planned to do many more of this genre.
I can only think of a couple of uses for this dictionary, but there may be some I have not thought of. It could be a useful tool to linguists doing historical and comparative linguistics (I only found two plausible "cognates": róga 'house': ruka 'house' in Mapudungun (language of the Mapuche people of Chile/Argentina); taita 'father': same in Quechua, but either or both of these could be due to chance or to borrowing, and the dictionary could help to find the basic meanings of isolated Guaraní terms found in written documents. But after many years of translating documents from Spanish to English, I have yet to encounter the first Guaraní term, but that will probably change tomorrow, of course.
Before we take a look at the dictionary entries, something must be said about the phonological/orthographic inventory/convention. I conjoined these two pairs on purpose because they are, unfortunately, not differentiated. The introduction lists six vowels (which is supported by other linguistic sources): a, e, i, o, u and y and their nasalized counterparts (which are indicated with the standard phonetic notation of a tilde over the vowel). Britton offers a rather unsophisticated description of the "y" vowel, and says that it is "Similar to (but not exactly like) the y in English yellow. As a matter of fact, this sixth vowel is really a high, central, unrounded vowel (which, indeed, does not exist in English, but is a common feature in Tupi and Panoan languages, as well as in Mapudungun, among others). Typically, linguists write this vowel as an "i" with some sort of superscript, such as an umlaut, which would prevent the use of the "y", which is normally reserved for a semi-vowel/consonant (an "i" in a consonant slot), and it would prevent such strange-looking items as yvyryryi 'earthquake,' tyvyta 'eyebrow' and yvy 'floor' (which is actually more like 'earth, soil, dirt'). Now, if the y vowel sounds like the "y" of yellow, try to pronounce yvyryryi. If you figure out how to produce a high, central, unrounded vowel (try slurring your tongue/mouth position from "i" (ee) to "o", maintaining unrounded lips, and the vocalic sound in question will be about half-way down the slur) than yvyryryi can be pronounced without much trouble as ïvïrïrïi (obviously an onomatopoetic expression for an earthquake event).
The consonants represent a full range of voiceless stops: p, t, k, plus a phonemic glottal stop. According to Britton, there are prenasalized stops: mb, nt, nd and ng, plus the standard nasals: m, n, ñ. That, along with the nasalized vowels must give it a particularly nasal/whiney sound, and is perhaps the reason why the Chilean lady told me that Guaraní is the greatest language on earth for expressing love (the dictionary does list a number of nouns and verbs for 'love' and 'lover'). The consonantal system is rounded out by an isolated voiced fricative v, an affricate sh written as 'ch,' a voiced affricate dzy written as a 'j,' and r and s. Britton indicates a g in the consonantal inventory, but the dictionary almost exclusively (except for some Spanish loans) uses the 'g' in combination with following 'u' (thus 'gu'), which suspiciously looks like an influence from Spanish orthography and probably represents the 'w' sound. Therefore, I suspect that an entry such as guyra 'bird' would then be pronounced as "wïra", and the adverb for 'down,' which is listed as iguype would probably be pronounced as "iwïpe". The author forgot to mention the l in his inventory, which is used throughout the Guaraní entries, albeit mostly in Spanish loans. The r was said to sound "as r in English radio", which I seriously doubt, as the American English 'r' is mostly vocalic, in which the tongue (articulator) does not really make contact with any point of articulation. I suspect that the 'r' is a true 'flapped r' in Guaraní, sounding like the middle sound in the word "butter" in standard American English.
The dictionary entries include solid indigenous items, such as many flora and fauna names, intricate non-western kinship terminology, cosmology items and, interestingly, a large number of religious and theological items of Roman Catholic usage, which may reflect the somewhat unusual practice of early (Jesuit) missionaries communicating with the people in their native tongue.
There are also some newly-coined native terms for such relatively modern concepts as: telegram, radio, television, linguistics, etc. There are native terms for the twelve months and almost all of the days of the week, as well as native unit terms for the numbers 1 through 20, plus words for hundred, thousand and million. There is even a native word for 'zero' papa'y.
The dictionary also lists quite a few loans from Spanish, such as: Kolõ 'Columbus,' kolo 'color,' komáyre [in which the 'y' is obviously not the sixth vowel] 'godmother,' kompáyre 'godfather,' etc. And then there are some loans the author presumably did not recognize as loans: chikóte 'whip,' líña 'cord,' máta 'plant, tree,' asukary 'syrup,' etc. Strangely enough, the word for "shaman" is a loan from Spanish médiku.
There is a notable absence in the dictionary of three crucial cultural items, they are: chipá the ubiquitous and all-important staple food in the form of a crunchy donut, made with manioc flour, lard and cheese; tereré which is the cold mate drink, seen everywhere in Paraguay, and; mandi'o the word used for the important crop of manioc, yuca, casava, tapioca. I was lucky to find 'mate' under 'tea' ka'ay, tata'y.
As a bonus, I discovered that the colloquial term for popcorn in Argentina, "pururú" or "pororó" may have come from Guaraní pururû 'crackle, to crackle,' unless both borrowed it from a third source. The term kaguy (presumably pronounced kawï) is misleadingly glossed as 'beer,' but after searching other sources it turns out to be traditional fermented drink that can be made of a number of fruits or tubers.
Conclusion: When I first saw the dictionary, I didn't think much of it, but after spending quite a bit of time thumbing its pages, I have come to the conclusion that it is a fascinating little volume for the inquisitive linguist with a background in indigenous languages of the Americas. I have no idea what this dictionary will do for the layman. The price is low enough that any field linguist should have it, and it could perhaps be used along with other, more expensive, linguistic treatments of the Guaraní language. On the other hand, there is at least one free online Guaraní/Spanish/German dictionary that seems to be somewhat more complete than this Guaraní/English dictionary, but has the same orthographic/phonological shortcomings.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article544.htm
Author: A. Scott Britton
Publisher: Hippocrene Books, Inc., New York
Copyright © 2005
ISBN: 0-77818-1066-3
240 pages, 120 pages with an estimated 3600 entries in each direction
Price printed on the back of the book: US$ 14.95 (available from major booksellers on the web at discounted price)
Robert CroeseThis paper-bound, small-sized (4 x 6 inches) booklet is one in a series of concise dictionaries published by Hippocrene Books, Inc. The inside cover lists 41 other dictionaries in print, including such mainstream languages as Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, etc., but also such esoteric languages as Gypsy, Ladino, Nahuatl, Twi and Zapotec (Isthmus). The back cover mentions other types of books published by Hippocrene Books, with such interesting topics as the culinary practices of various Latin American countries and a Dictionary and Phrasebook of Chilenismos. The last-named title lists at US$ 11.95.
The introduction to the dictionary states that "Guaraní, Avañe'ê to its speakers, is the language of over four million people in Paraguay and maintains and official status with Spanish in that country." This indigenous language pertains to the Tupi language family, members of which extend from the Peruvian rainforest and Bolivia to the west, throughout Brazil to the north and the east, and into Argentina to the south. Mary Ritchie Key (1997, 77) mentioned that:
"Perhaps the most famous member of [the Tupi family] is the Guaraní of Paraguay. It has captured the attention of sociolinguists, sociologists, and people in education, because of the bilingual nature of the country and the dominant position of Guaraní even among non-Indian speakers. It is said in Paraguay that 'Spanish comes from the Paraguayan mind; Guaraní springs from the heart.' (Gorham 1973: 1) This language has also provided a lingua franca for a large area in Brazil where travel and migrations were extensive."
According to the Ethnologue (12th Ed., Page 110), some three million people speak Guaraní in Paraguay, which is 95% of the population. Just over 50% of rural Paraguayans are monolingual in Guaraní.
There are two types of Guaraní language: The pure indigenous form and a mixed language spoken in and around Asunción, called Jopara, which, according to Britton (Page 3), is "more of a switching back and forth than a cohesive blend between Guaraní and Spanish."
I had high hopes that this dictionary might include useful phrases for learning some of the basics of Guaraní communication, but, unfortunately, the dictionary only consists of single lexical entries, identified by part of speech, and primarily glossed with one or two entries from the other language. All entries appear to be faithfully cross-referenced in the reverse dictionary. Verbs are only listed as v.r. (verb root), with no indication of verb conjugations.
I asked the publisher to be put in touch with Mr. Britton, the author of this dictionary (which didn't happen), so I could ask him a couple of simple questions: 1) What is the mission of this one-term basically one-meaning dictionary, and 2) what is the source of the word list or how was the material gathered? Unfortunately, I don't have the answers to these questions. The publisher did tell me, however, that Britton had also authored the Zapotec dictionary, and that he planned to do many more of this genre.
I can only think of a couple of uses for this dictionary, but there may be some I have not thought of. It could be a useful tool to linguists doing historical and comparative linguistics (I only found two plausible "cognates": róga 'house': ruka 'house' in Mapudungun (language of the Mapuche people of Chile/Argentina); taita 'father': same in Quechua, but either or both of these could be due to chance or to borrowing, and the dictionary could help to find the basic meanings of isolated Guaraní terms found in written documents. But after many years of translating documents from Spanish to English, I have yet to encounter the first Guaraní term, but that will probably change tomorrow, of course.
Before we take a look at the dictionary entries, something must be said about the phonological/orthographic inventory/convention. I conjoined these two pairs on purpose because they are, unfortunately, not differentiated. The introduction lists six vowels (which is supported by other linguistic sources): a, e, i, o, u and y and their nasalized counterparts (which are indicated with the standard phonetic notation of a tilde over the vowel). Britton offers a rather unsophisticated description of the "y" vowel, and says that it is "Similar to (but not exactly like) the y in English yellow. As a matter of fact, this sixth vowel is really a high, central, unrounded vowel (which, indeed, does not exist in English, but is a common feature in Tupi and Panoan languages, as well as in Mapudungun, among others). Typically, linguists write this vowel as an "i" with some sort of superscript, such as an umlaut, which would prevent the use of the "y", which is normally reserved for a semi-vowel/consonant (an "i" in a consonant slot), and it would prevent such strange-looking items as yvyryryi 'earthquake,' tyvyta 'eyebrow' and yvy 'floor' (which is actually more like 'earth, soil, dirt'). Now, if the y vowel sounds like the "y" of yellow, try to pronounce yvyryryi. If you figure out how to produce a high, central, unrounded vowel (try slurring your tongue/mouth position from "i" (ee) to "o", maintaining unrounded lips, and the vocalic sound in question will be about half-way down the slur) than yvyryryi can be pronounced without much trouble as ïvïrïrïi (obviously an onomatopoetic expression for an earthquake event).
The consonants represent a full range of voiceless stops: p, t, k, plus a phonemic glottal stop. According to Britton, there are prenasalized stops: mb, nt, nd and ng, plus the standard nasals: m, n, ñ. That, along with the nasalized vowels must give it a particularly nasal/whiney sound, and is perhaps the reason why the Chilean lady told me that Guaraní is the greatest language on earth for expressing love (the dictionary does list a number of nouns and verbs for 'love' and 'lover'). The consonantal system is rounded out by an isolated voiced fricative v, an affricate sh written as 'ch,' a voiced affricate dzy written as a 'j,' and r and s. Britton indicates a g in the consonantal inventory, but the dictionary almost exclusively (except for some Spanish loans) uses the 'g' in combination with following 'u' (thus 'gu'), which suspiciously looks like an influence from Spanish orthography and probably represents the 'w' sound. Therefore, I suspect that an entry such as guyra 'bird' would then be pronounced as "wïra", and the adverb for 'down,' which is listed as iguype would probably be pronounced as "iwïpe". The author forgot to mention the l in his inventory, which is used throughout the Guaraní entries, albeit mostly in Spanish loans. The r was said to sound "as r in English radio", which I seriously doubt, as the American English 'r' is mostly vocalic, in which the tongue (articulator) does not really make contact with any point of articulation. I suspect that the 'r' is a true 'flapped r' in Guaraní, sounding like the middle sound in the word "butter" in standard American English.
The dictionary entries include solid indigenous items, such as many flora and fauna names, intricate non-western kinship terminology, cosmology items and, interestingly, a large number of religious and theological items of Roman Catholic usage, which may reflect the somewhat unusual practice of early (Jesuit) missionaries communicating with the people in their native tongue.
There are also some newly-coined native terms for such relatively modern concepts as: telegram, radio, television, linguistics, etc. There are native terms for the twelve months and almost all of the days of the week, as well as native unit terms for the numbers 1 through 20, plus words for hundred, thousand and million. There is even a native word for 'zero' papa'y.
The dictionary also lists quite a few loans from Spanish, such as: Kolõ 'Columbus,' kolo 'color,' komáyre [in which the 'y' is obviously not the sixth vowel] 'godmother,' kompáyre 'godfather,' etc. And then there are some loans the author presumably did not recognize as loans: chikóte 'whip,' líña 'cord,' máta 'plant, tree,' asukary 'syrup,' etc. Strangely enough, the word for "shaman" is a loan from Spanish médiku.
There is a notable absence in the dictionary of three crucial cultural items, they are: chipá the ubiquitous and all-important staple food in the form of a crunchy donut, made with manioc flour, lard and cheese; tereré which is the cold mate drink, seen everywhere in Paraguay, and; mandi'o the word used for the important crop of manioc, yuca, casava, tapioca. I was lucky to find 'mate' under 'tea' ka'ay, tata'y.
As a bonus, I discovered that the colloquial term for popcorn in Argentina, "pururú" or "pororó" may have come from Guaraní pururû 'crackle, to crackle,' unless both borrowed it from a third source. The term kaguy (presumably pronounced kawï) is misleadingly glossed as 'beer,' but after searching other sources it turns out to be traditional fermented drink that can be made of a number of fruits or tubers.
Conclusion: When I first saw the dictionary, I didn't think much of it, but after spending quite a bit of time thumbing its pages, I have come to the conclusion that it is a fascinating little volume for the inquisitive linguist with a background in indigenous languages of the Americas. I have no idea what this dictionary will do for the layman. The price is low enough that any field linguist should have it, and it could perhaps be used along with other, more expensive, linguistic treatments of the Guaraní language. On the other hand, there is at least one free online Guaraní/Spanish/German dictionary that seems to be somewhat more complete than this Guaraní/English dictionary, but has the same orthographic/phonological shortcomings.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article544.htm
Dictionary Review: Hungarian Practical Dictionary
Title: Hungarian Practical Dictionary
Compiled by: Éva Szabó
Publisher: Hippocrene Books, Inc. (softcover)
ISBN: 0-7818-X
No. of Pages: 695
Catherine Bokor photo When I picked up this small dictionary of 31,000 entries, I wondered 'Why do we need a small dictionary when we have the benchmark large Országh?' The title explains it one way: it is a practical dictionary. The Preface mentions the other reason: it is a contemporary dictionary. Indeed, we all know that no matter how comprehensive a dictionary might be, it becomes obsolete by the time it emerges from the printer. An interesting phenomenon can be illustrated through the term ATM, for example. When the above-mentioned benchmark dictionary was published, this term was not very well known in Hungary. As it was the case with many of the newly created or discovered terms, several until one 'took.' The Országh dictionary translates ATM as "bankjegykiadó automata" (literal translation: banknote issuing automutomatic machine). This dictionary calls it "pénzfelvevő automata" (lit. transl. money receiving automatic machine). When I google these terms, the former has 607 hits, the latter only 25. Yet, most people would use the latter in everyday, colloquial Hungarian.
The dictionary is aimed mostly at brave Americans who are interested in learning Hungarian, but would also help Hungarians learning English.
The author makes a valiant effort to explain the intricacies of the Hungarian language, some of which I am not sure the American reader, used to a simpler structure, will be able to follow without a live teacher. The bilingual list of abbreviations is very helpful. So is the extensive pronunciation guide with special attention paid to vowel harmony.
The Appendices at the end are quite useful. I would have moved the Hungarian irregular verbs to the beginning of the book where Hungarian grammar is discussed, but perhaps the author felt that the juxtaposition of both English and Hungarian irregular verbs might be more interesting. These are followed by a listing of numbers and measurements in both languages as well as the States and Territories of the USA, inccluding their abbreviations.
An oddity at the very end is that some of the authors listed among the Works Consulted have their names in the order as used in English, with given name first, followed by a comma and family name last, as e.g., Imre, Móra Gábor, Kiss, but Pusztai Ferenc has his name in the order used in Hungarian: family name first, followed by given name with no comma.
I had some doubts about some of the entries:
Kenyér n bread; livelihood, a living-may be somewhat confusing. It is appropriate in a large dictionary but, without examples of the way the word is used in the second meaning, it is beyond the scope of a small, practical dictionary.
The dictionary does little to explain the use of the intricate system of Hungarian suffixes, except for listing some of them and giving a few sentences as examples. This list is helpful to those interested in the Hungarian language who want know what the suffixes stand for, and it is easy to apply when the suffix is a simple addition to a word, as in "mi" (nominative case) v. "mit" (accusative case). However, it must be confusing when a vowel (and not always the same vowel) is inserted between the word and the suffix -t. E.g. "könyv" (book) becomes "könyvet" v. "óra" (hour), which becomes "órát," or when the final vowel of the root word changes with the addition of the suffix: konyha (kitchen)- konyhává ([transform] into a kitchen).
Neither does the dictionary explain the consonant harmony rules, whereby the first consonant of a suffix disappears and the last consonant of the root word is doubled instead; thus the resultative suffix -vá, -vé, as in konyha - konyhává, becomes gá: boldog - boldoggá ([make somebody] happy) instead of boldogvá.
But then again, a relatively small dictionary like this cannot be expected to be everything to all people. Perhaps the intention was to whet the appetite of the linguistically curious to venture further into the mysteries of the Hungarian language.
I perused this dictionary page after page and could barely find a typo here and there, which is a credit to the typesetter and proofreader. I also liked the simple, clear layout, and the easy-to-read type size. It is not the typesetter's fault that Hong Kong was spelled in the English way, and not the Hungarian way, which is Hongkong.
All in all, this practical dictionary is what it says it is: a practical companion for the American traveler. It is definitely an asset for second-generation Hungarians whose mother tongue may be Hungarian, but whose dominant language is English, who know to eat chicken paprikash in Hungarian but perhaps find it difficult to talk about weapons of mass destruction, sexual harassment, or cell phone (which they will find in the dictionary), or domestic violence (which they will not). It is of little use to the translator who is supposed to be beyond this stage.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article1179.htm
Compiled by: Éva Szabó
Publisher: Hippocrene Books, Inc. (softcover)
ISBN: 0-7818-X
No. of Pages: 695
Catherine Bokor photo When I picked up this small dictionary of 31,000 entries, I wondered 'Why do we need a small dictionary when we have the benchmark large Országh?' The title explains it one way: it is a practical dictionary. The Preface mentions the other reason: it is a contemporary dictionary. Indeed, we all know that no matter how comprehensive a dictionary might be, it becomes obsolete by the time it emerges from the printer. An interesting phenomenon can be illustrated through the term ATM, for example. When the above-mentioned benchmark dictionary was published, this term was not very well known in Hungary. As it was the case with many of the newly created or discovered terms, several until one 'took.' The Országh dictionary translates ATM as "bankjegykiadó automata" (literal translation: banknote issuing automutomatic machine). This dictionary calls it "pénzfelvevő automata" (lit. transl. money receiving automatic machine). When I google these terms, the former has 607 hits, the latter only 25. Yet, most people would use the latter in everyday, colloquial Hungarian.
The dictionary is aimed mostly at brave Americans who are interested in learning Hungarian, but would also help Hungarians learning English.
The author makes a valiant effort to explain the intricacies of the Hungarian language, some of which I am not sure the American reader, used to a simpler structure, will be able to follow without a live teacher. The bilingual list of abbreviations is very helpful. So is the extensive pronunciation guide with special attention paid to vowel harmony.
The Appendices at the end are quite useful. I would have moved the Hungarian irregular verbs to the beginning of the book where Hungarian grammar is discussed, but perhaps the author felt that the juxtaposition of both English and Hungarian irregular verbs might be more interesting. These are followed by a listing of numbers and measurements in both languages as well as the States and Territories of the USA, inccluding their abbreviations.
An oddity at the very end is that some of the authors listed among the Works Consulted have their names in the order as used in English, with given name first, followed by a comma and family name last, as e.g., Imre, Móra Gábor, Kiss, but Pusztai Ferenc has his name in the order used in Hungarian: family name first, followed by given name with no comma.
I had some doubts about some of the entries:
Kenyér n bread; livelihood, a living-may be somewhat confusing. It is appropriate in a large dictionary but, without examples of the way the word is used in the second meaning, it is beyond the scope of a small, practical dictionary.
The dictionary does little to explain the use of the intricate system of Hungarian suffixes, except for listing some of them and giving a few sentences as examples. This list is helpful to those interested in the Hungarian language who want know what the suffixes stand for, and it is easy to apply when the suffix is a simple addition to a word, as in "mi" (nominative case) v. "mit" (accusative case). However, it must be confusing when a vowel (and not always the same vowel) is inserted between the word and the suffix -t. E.g. "könyv" (book) becomes "könyvet" v. "óra" (hour), which becomes "órát," or when the final vowel of the root word changes with the addition of the suffix: konyha (kitchen)- konyhává ([transform] into a kitchen).
Neither does the dictionary explain the consonant harmony rules, whereby the first consonant of a suffix disappears and the last consonant of the root word is doubled instead; thus the resultative suffix -vá, -vé, as in konyha - konyhává, becomes gá: boldog - boldoggá ([make somebody] happy) instead of boldogvá.
But then again, a relatively small dictionary like this cannot be expected to be everything to all people. Perhaps the intention was to whet the appetite of the linguistically curious to venture further into the mysteries of the Hungarian language.
I perused this dictionary page after page and could barely find a typo here and there, which is a credit to the typesetter and proofreader. I also liked the simple, clear layout, and the easy-to-read type size. It is not the typesetter's fault that Hong Kong was spelled in the English way, and not the Hungarian way, which is Hongkong.
All in all, this practical dictionary is what it says it is: a practical companion for the American traveler. It is definitely an asset for second-generation Hungarians whose mother tongue may be Hungarian, but whose dominant language is English, who know to eat chicken paprikash in Hungarian but perhaps find it difficult to talk about weapons of mass destruction, sexual harassment, or cell phone (which they will find in the dictionary), or domestic violence (which they will not). It is of little use to the translator who is supposed to be beyond this stage.
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article1179.htm
Bouvier's Law Dictionary for Palm OS 1.8
The law dictionary lexicon for BDicty is based on the sixth edition (1856) of John Bouvier's law dictionary. This is a classic reference material for students and legal professionals, but can also be of interest to all information junkies. The bundle includes the Pro version of BDicty Dictionary Reader, making it appropriate for extending with other legal, language, medical and entertainment titles. The full version lexicon features over 6,500 legal terms.
Version 1.8 offers full text search within dictionary articles (for dictionaries) and phrases (for phrasebook lexicons). Note the dual function of the find button: a quick single tap versus holding it down for a short while before releasing it.
CNET Networks is not responsible for the content of this Publisher's Description. We encourage you to determine whether this product or your intended use is legal. We do not encourage or condone the use of any software in violation of applicable laws. Any questions, complaints or claims related to any specific download should be directed to the relevant vendor.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/downloads/0,139024478,10280124s,00.htm
Version 1.8 offers full text search within dictionary articles (for dictionaries) and phrases (for phrasebook lexicons). Note the dual function of the find button: a quick single tap versus holding it down for a short while before releasing it.
CNET Networks is not responsible for the content of this Publisher's Description. We encourage you to determine whether this product or your intended use is legal. We do not encourage or condone the use of any software in violation of applicable laws. Any questions, complaints or claims related to any specific download should be directed to the relevant vendor.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/downloads/0,139024478,10280124s,00.htm
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