Translating English Specialized Dictionary Articles into Danish and Spanish: Some Reflections

Abstract

This paper aims to cast some light on three broad topics. Firstly, it elaborates on the concept of dictionaries as texts. Hence, they are compiled to provide assistance in several situations and are divided into sections that often represent different text types. Secondly, it defends that lexicographic equivalence is a parole phenomenon that is so much influenced by genre and topic conventions that practicing it, e.g. translating bilingual dictionary articles, requires skills that, to the best of our knowledge, have not been described in the lexicographic literature. Thirdly, reflections on the above topics are illustrated with the practice of translating the English dictionary articles of the Accounting Dictionaries into Danish and Spanish. They will allow us to comment on some peculiarities of specialized dictionary translation, i.e. a type of translation that shows some differences with standard text types such as journal articles, books and so on.

A Brief Comparative Analysis of Two Bilingual Dictionaries of Islamic Finance and Economy

“…Dictionaries whether general or specialized, monolingual or bilingual vary in their treatment of words and presentation since they cater to the needs and interests of specific users. A dictionary may be consulted for: 1) communicative situations: either a writer or a translator seeks a word to deliver a certain sense as part of a communicative act, and 2) cognitive situations: it is when a student or a translator needs to widen his knowledge about a subject field (Fuertes-Olivera & Nielsen, 2018). Also, a dictionary may be consulted for a) accurate pronunciation, b) stress, c) orthographic and morphological information, d) usage, e) collocation, f) synonyms and/or antonyms in rare cases, and g) plural forms as the case in Arabic.…”

“…Similarly, bilingual accounting dictionaries for example provide "headwords, definitions, equivalents, inflectional data, synonyms, antonyms, collocations and phrases, example sentences, data on sources and cross-references" (Fuertes-Olivera & Nielsen, 2018). In addition, some dictionaries may also provide factual issues and usage restrictions (Fuertes-Olivera & Nielsen, 2018).…”