Translation and Lexicography: a Necessary Dialogue

Revista de Lexicografía, 2018

En este artículo partimos de la idea de que solo la existencia de una base lexicográfica adecuada puede ayudarnos a diseñar diccionarios de negocios capaces de ayudar a traducir textos comerciales. El tratamiento gramatical es un buen ejemplo de las diferentes posibilidades con las que cuenta el lexicógrafo. Si, como se propone en este artículo, el lexicógrafo utiliza un enfoque funcional, el tratamiento de los datos gramaticales debe basarse en el uso sistemático de dos estructuras lexicográficas: textos intermedios y sistema de referencias entre los textos intermedios y las entradas. Ilustramos nuestra propuesta partiendo del estudio del tratamiento de las preposiciones en dos diccionarios comerciales bilingües y bidireccionales (Inglés-Español) que creemos que no ofrecen un tratamiento lexicográfico adecuado de las preposiciones.

International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography

The present chapter examines the peculiarities of lexicography linking two languages. It addresses the following broad issues: Can bilingual dictionaries legitimately be called translation dictionaries? What language pairs do they normally cover? Who uses them? What are the most persistent problems faced by bilingual lexicography and what time-honored theoretical assumptions are they grounded in? Why is lexicographic equivalence a problematic notion? How is the bilingual dictionary currently changing and what is its future likely to be? The discussion is preceded by a few words of general introduction. *It is common practice in the metalexicographic literature for the two terms to be used interchangeably. There is, however, one notable text in which the equation has been questioned: the 1940 essay by the Russian linguist Lev N. Ščerba (1995). A practicing (Russian-French) lexicographer himself, Ščerba argued that only the L1-L2 dictionary could properly be considered a translation dictionary, whereas the L2-L1 dictionary should rather be called explanatory. His reasoning was that the two perform essentially different functions: translation from the user's native into a foreign language (L1-L2 dictionary) as opposed to explaining the meanings of foreign-language words and expressions (L2-L1 dictionary). When one starts from one's L1, he argued, the meaning to be expressed, encoded in a particular L1 lexical item, is clearly understoodall that is needed is a corresponding L2 item which can express the same meaning. The lexicons of different languages being essentially incommensurable, such an L2 counterpart will usually be no more than an approximation of the L1 unit, but it should suffice for the purposes of basic translation; anyway, under the circumstances, this is the best that can be done.

Lenguaje Y Textos, 1992

BARRERA-VID AL, A. (1973). "El vocabulario y las estructuras de base para el certificado de español de las universidades populares: los problemas de elaboración de un 'español básico"'. Español Actual 25, 24-26.

The book discusses basic issues in bilingual lexicography (and in translation), such as the nature of equivalence, use of bilingual dictionaries.

Terminology, 2009

It is common knowledge that Bilingual Pedagogical Dictionaries for production have to consider students’ encoding needs (Tarp, 2006), (Zgusta, 2006), that is to say, they have to contain more comprehensive and more systematic information about words (JACKSON, 2002, p. 84). Grammar and syntactic information are more needed than it is usually assumed; they are essential to clarify syntactic possibilitites and determine sentence structure and meaning accuracy (Wiegand 1985, apud WELKER, 2006). Among those, the most important grammatical information for encoding is given for verbs, since they are the pivotal element of sentences and to a large extent determine the syntax of the clause or sentence in which they occur (JACKSON, 2002, p.136). In this context, contrastive linguistics (CL), more specifically error analysis (EA) and contrastive analysis (CA) are valuable methods of investigation. Contrastive linguistics has been heavily attacked because its first objective was to identify points of contrast between pairs of languages in order to preview and to suppress language learners’ difficulties. Recent studies on error analysis have brought a new and more reasonable view to the contrastive linguistics theory. Since then, it has become a reliable source for understanding student’s needs and mother-language/target-language reference association. Currently, researchers rely on error analysis as the starting point for a CL investigation. EA can detect, describe and possibly help explain deviant utterances in foreign language learning, which may be due to divergences between the source and the target language (HARTMANN, 2007, p.18). EA followed by CA has proven to be an assertive way to improve solutions to the problem of establishing translation equivalents (HARTMANN, 2007, p.18) which goes beyond the lexical-semantic relation and introduces the so needed morfo-syntactical information. In the case of Portuguese – English verbs, as shown in this paper, it was very effective.

Innovación y desarrollo en Español como Lengua Extranjera, 2016

ISBN: 978-84-9012-633-2

Esta editorial es miembro de la UNE, lo que garantiza la difusión y comercialización de sus publicaciones a nivel nacional e internacional.

As new concepts, objects or ideas are conceived in the field of scientific knowledge, so do new terms appear to accommodate them. These terms are adapted to other languages in order to gain worldwide recognition. However, the procedure followed to transmit this terminology varies depending on the specificity of the field and on the richness of the target language. Sometimes, the target language has a similar term or phrase, which may be used to transmit the concept; a new term is introduced in this language or an existing term can be adapted to convey the same idea. In this paper, we intend to analyse the different procedures followed to adapt English terms to the Spanish language. The objectives of this paper are to observe and classify the different translation patterns of English terms into Spanish and to determine whether a procedure or standard organization exists which is taken into consideration when a new term is introduced to the Spanish lexicon. To date, we have not unveil...