Bilingual Lexicography

Abstract

Bilingual dictionaries are created to build a bridge between two languages, the source and the target language, so that speakers of the two understand each other. Bilingual lexicography is a discipline exploring bilingual dictionaries from various aspects. It investigates the how-to’s of making bilingual dictionaries (“practical lexicography”), their quality and usability (“dictionary use”), and also the theoretical issues specific to bilingual dictionaries (“meta-lexicography” or “dictionary research”). Bilingual dictionaries can be classified according to several factors, such as size, directionality, purpose, and target audience (“dictionary typology”), all of which may have an impact on the content and layout of dictionaries. Although the earliest known bilingual dictionary—a bilingual wordlist—dates back to 2400 bce, the history of bilingual lexicography is surprisingly short. Roughly speaking, it was not before the 1950s that scientific discussion started in the field. While the subsequent decades brought about several interesting meta-lexicographic discourses, two topics proved to be especially important. The first one concerns the purpose of the user, according to which a dictionary can be used for text production or text comprehension. It is easy to see that these user scenarios require different types of information. Ideally, bilingual dictionaries reflect this distinction: encoding or active dictionaries and decoding or passive dictionaries should be differentiated. In either case, lexicographers need to know what counts as a good translation. This intricate question, the other main topic of the last few decades, lies at the heart of the field and can only be answered if we understand how to think of translation equivalence, the relation between the source expression and its target language correspondent. The digital age introduced changes at every level of bilingual lexicography. Not only were existing dictionaries converted into electronic format with more refined search options, but also more sophisticated dictionary-writing systems appeared facilitating dictionary-making. Furthermore, most importantly, language data has been gaining an increasing role during the dictionary compilation process. Despite the growing amount of literature in the field and the empirical shift in its methodology, both the scientific status of bilingual lexicography and its relation to linguistics remained unclear. Despite its importance, especially in the case of learners of a foreign language, bilingual lexicography is considered to be a subfield of lexicography rather than a discipline on its own. Indeed, hardly any conference or journal is devoted exclusively to bilingual lexicography. Furthermore, a substantial number of textbooks, general overviews, and reference works on bilingual lexicography cover other branches of lexicography as well. As a result, besides bilingual lexicography, items on general lexicography are also cataloged here; however, their relation to bilingual lexicography is always indicated. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics article Lexicography for further information on lexicography in general.