The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
IntroductionResearch into dictionary use has become increasingly important in recent years. In contrast to 15 years ago, new findings in this area are presented every year, e.g. at every Euralex or eLex conference. These studies range from questionnaire or log file studies to smaller-scale studies focussing on eye tracking, usability, or other aspects of dictionary use measurable in a lab. For an overview of different studies,
In this article we describe a framework for the corpus-based comparative investigation of interpreting and translation, illustrating it through a study of simplification across different modes of language production and across different language pairs. We rely on EPTIC, a corpus featuring plenary speeches at the European Parliament in their interpreted and translated versions, aligned to each other and to their source texts in English<=>Italian and English<=>French. Aiming to shed light on lexical simplification in different mediation modes, we compare interpretations and translations to each other and to comparable original speeches and their edited written versions. Specifically, we compare lexical features (lexical density, type-token ratio, core vocabulary and list head coverage) in interpreting and translation into English from French and Italian, both in a monolingual comparable perspective and an intermodal perspective. Our results do not unconditionally support the simplification hypothesis: lexical simplification is observed in mediated English, but is found to be greater when the source language is French, and in interpretations rather than translations. We conclude that this feature is contingent on both the mediation mode and the source languages involved, and that the influence of the latter seems to be stronger than that of the former.
This paper proposes an exploratory bird's-eye view of contrastive word-formation research, an area which, to date, remains largely under-researched in the three fields in which it partakes, namely morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. Studies in contrastive word-formation, as well as their meta-analysis in terms of scope, objectives and data, are presented in a critical survey of the literature, together with an extensive bibliography . A new contrastive methodology for future research is looked into and the major practical applications of contrastive word-formation in bilingual lexicography and translator training, among others, are overviewed. Contrastive wordformation, it is argued, should be set within a more rigorous theoretical and methodological framework, which would be characterised by a dynamic conception of the tertium comparationis and the use of empirical data drawn from multilingual corpora.Contrastive word-formation is at the intersection of two major areas: wordformation (which is encapsulated in the broader fields of morphology and lexicology) and contrastive linguistics. 1 It is now gradually emerging as a field of * This paper was first presented at the English Word-Formation in Contrast seminar of the 10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy). I am greatly indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the first draft of this paper. 1 Morphology is here viewed as "the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed" (Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 1-2). It is traditionally divided Brought to you by | HEC Bibliotheque Maryriam ET J. Authenticated Download Date | 6/7/15 9:47 AM
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