Лексикология английского языка

Bilingual dictionaries

A bilingual dictionary is useful to several kinds of people: to those who study foreign languages, to specialists reading foreign literature, to translators, to travellers, and to linguists. It may have two principal purposes: reference for translation and guidance for expression. It must provide an adequate translation in the target language of every word and expression in the source language. It is also supposed to contain all the inflectional, derivational, semantic and syntactic information that its reader might ever need, and also information on spelling and pronunciation.

The entries of a dictionary are usually arranged in alphabetical order.

What is unfortunately not always realized in connection with the compiling of bilingual dictionaries is that the same bilingual dictionary cannot serve the needs of the speakers of both languages. An English-Russian dictionary for Russians is different from an English-Russian dictionary for British or American readers.

It should also be realized that a bilingual dictionary is not equivalent to a unilingual dictionary.

The English-speaking user of a unilingual dictionary is likely to know the meaning of all the words in the explanatory part and should therefore be able to find the appropriate meaning for his context. The Russian-speaking user of a Russian-English dictionary would refer to its entries in order to express himself in English and he will need to know how the English words he finds there are used.

To sum up: the native-to-foreign and foreign-to-native dictionaries have to meet different requirements as they supply information for different types of work.

A good dictionary is one where you can quickly find what you are looking for.