... At the very early stage of the analysis, Emery was able to detect significant influence of a ... more ... At the very early stage of the analysis, Emery was able to detect significant influence of a higher variety (Classical or as he termed it 'pan-Arabic') on Omani's linguistic repertoire and patterns, which was due to early education and media. ...
This is an empirical investigation into the use of dictionaries by students of English and Scienc... more This is an empirical investigation into the use of dictionaries by students of English and Science at Kuwait University with a particular focus on bilingual dictionaries of Arabic and English. In the introductory chapter we discuss the increasingly important role of ...
This study has been conducted with the aim of detecting possible links between the structural fea... more This study has been conducted with the aim of detecting possible links between the structural features of English-Arabic dictionaries and errors made by 46 English majors at Kuwait University when translating individual items they encountered in current English texts. Specially designed look-up records were used by the subjects for each problematic word. It was found that success rates decreased when long entries of polysemous words were consulted in the bilingual dictionary and the senses needed in the entries were located some distance away from the senses that these users actually extracted. Some of the students' erroneous translations were attributed to the problematic macro-and microstructural features of the English-Arabic dictionary: method of sense ordering, untranslated derivatives, column width, spacing between monosemous entries, typeface size, etc. The study also detected a part played by structural effects of the original English text, e.g. word division at line endings. The users were also responsible for some of these errors, e.g. by misreading the item in the text, especially in cases of English confusables.
This article investigates the treatment of vocabulary items relating to Islam and the Arab world ... more This article investigates the treatment of vocabulary items relating to Islam and the Arab world in three major English dictionaries: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, New Oxford Dictionary of English, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The three dictionaries are compared with regard to their inclusion of 73 Arabic items (including loanwords) used in texts on Islam and the Middle East at the Google news file. With religion as theme, eight of these terms have been examined and compared across their entries in these three dictionaries to determine the closeness of the lexicographic description of these terms to their original meanings among native speakers of Arabic and to detect, from these speakers' viewpoint, any deficiencies in the defining language of their respective entries. The examination of the definitions of terms relating to Islam and the Arab world in the three dictionaries has revealed a number of pitfalls that may require editorial reconsideration. These include circularity, insufficient information, negative contexts, very general definitions, ambiguity, incomplete information, narrow definitions and encyclopedic redundancy.
... At the very early stage of the analysis, Emery was able to detect significant influence of a ... more ... At the very early stage of the analysis, Emery was able to detect significant influence of a higher variety (Classical or as he termed it 'pan-Arabic') on Omani's linguistic repertoire and patterns, which was due to early education and media. ...
This is an empirical investigation into the use of dictionaries by students of English and Scienc... more This is an empirical investigation into the use of dictionaries by students of English and Science at Kuwait University with a particular focus on bilingual dictionaries of Arabic and English. In the introductory chapter we discuss the increasingly important role of ...
This study has been conducted with the aim of detecting possible links between the structural fea... more This study has been conducted with the aim of detecting possible links between the structural features of English-Arabic dictionaries and errors made by 46 English majors at Kuwait University when translating individual items they encountered in current English texts. Specially designed look-up records were used by the subjects for each problematic word. It was found that success rates decreased when long entries of polysemous words were consulted in the bilingual dictionary and the senses needed in the entries were located some distance away from the senses that these users actually extracted. Some of the students' erroneous translations were attributed to the problematic macro-and microstructural features of the English-Arabic dictionary: method of sense ordering, untranslated derivatives, column width, spacing between monosemous entries, typeface size, etc. The study also detected a part played by structural effects of the original English text, e.g. word division at line endings. The users were also responsible for some of these errors, e.g. by misreading the item in the text, especially in cases of English confusables.
This article investigates the treatment of vocabulary items relating to Islam and the Arab world ... more This article investigates the treatment of vocabulary items relating to Islam and the Arab world in three major English dictionaries: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, New Oxford Dictionary of English, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The three dictionaries are compared with regard to their inclusion of 73 Arabic items (including loanwords) used in texts on Islam and the Middle East at the Google news file. With religion as theme, eight of these terms have been examined and compared across their entries in these three dictionaries to determine the closeness of the lexicographic description of these terms to their original meanings among native speakers of Arabic and to detect, from these speakers' viewpoint, any deficiencies in the defining language of their respective entries. The examination of the definitions of terms relating to Islam and the Arab world in the three dictionaries has revealed a number of pitfalls that may require editorial reconsideration. These include circularity, insufficient information, negative contexts, very general definitions, ambiguity, incomplete information, narrow definitions and encyclopedic redundancy.
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