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Mr. *** was not amused!
Mr. *** (we do not know his name), a member of the Roma people, was not amused. Not amused at all. He opened his copy of Dicionário Houaiss, one of the two most influential dictionaries published in Brazil, and did not like what he saw therein. Specifically, he found item 5 in the “cigano” (that is gypsy) entry absolutely unacceptable, not to say insulting...
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Book Review - A Non-Native User's Perspective of Corpus-Based Dictionaries of English and French
Corpus-based dictionaries are intended for any native or non-native speaker of a particular language. Nonetheless, terminology researchers insist that professional translators need to be aware of the array of resources made available to them by modern dictionaries…
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Dictionary Review: Hungarian Practical Dictionary
When I picked up this small dictionary of 31,000 entries, I wondered 'Why do we need a small dictionary when we have the benchmark large Országh?' The title explains it one way: it is a practical dictionary. The Preface mentions the other reason: it is a contemporary dictionary. Indeed, we all know that no matter how comprehensive a dictionary might be, it becomes obsolete by the time it emerges from the printer. An interesting phenomenon can be illustrated through the term ATM, for example…
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What Should a Learner's Dictionary Include?
The present study aims at the comparison and contrast of three monolingual (English-English) dictionaries namely: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary and Cambridge International Dictionary of English, with the learner in mind. It has been found that there are differences in presenting lexical items in each of the three dictionaries, which prompted me to invent a heuristic checklist against which each dictionary is evaluated with reference to twenty six representative lexical items chosen at random…
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e-Dictionaries
Dictionaries are a serious and time-consuming matter with a lot of work to do before publishing and e-dictionaries cannot be an exception.
Real dictionaries can be characterized as follows:
Dictionaries make a complete or partial inventory of a language in one or more languages…
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Guaraní Dictionary
This paper-bound, small-sized (4 x 6 inches) booklet is one in a series of concise dictionaries published by Hippocrene Books, Inc. The inside cover lists 41 other dictionaries in print, including such mainstream languages as Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, etc., but also such esoteric languages as Gypsy, Ladino, Nahuatl, Twi and Zapotec (Isthmus). The back cover mentions other types of books published by Hippocrene Books, with such interesting topics as the culinary practices of various Latin American countries and a Dictionary and Phrasebook of Chilenismos…
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On Dictionaries: A Conversation with Ilan Stavans
VA: What is language?
IS: The use of standardized symbols to communicate in a structured and consistent fashion.
VA: Standardized symbols?
IS: Sounds make words and words are symbols. By circumscribing the sounds PE-YO-TE to the small, soft, thornless, blue-and-green cactus found in Mexico and in the Southwestern United States, society attaches a name to the object. The name represents the object and stands in its stead. Objects have specific words attached. This specificity is crucial, for if the cactus changed every minute, language would defeat its own purpose. It would be shaped by chaos …
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Research on Dictionary Use by Trainee Translators
It is a generally held belief that using dictionaries efficiently can provide valuable benefits to trainee translators. However, as some authors have stated (Roberts, 1992; Mackintosh, 1998; Corpas et al., 2001), there has not been enough empirical research to establish the profile of trainee translators as dictionary users. In this paper, we outline the results we obtained from an empirical research carried out among students of Translation Studies at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) in order to understand the situation of our students …
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Online dictionary resources for patent, technical and medical translation from Japanese, German and French to English
Part 2 - Useful Websites for Translation of Patents from German and French
Part 2 will look at websites and techniques that can be used in a similar way for translation into English of patent applications published mainly in German and French, but to some extent also in other European languages …
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Time Pressure and Dictionary Availability
Electronic documentation has become an essential tool in the area of translation studies research. Needless to say, psycholinguistic methods of verbal reporting (Think-Aloud Protocols - TAPs) have also been efficiently used to conduct scientific experiments in this field. This paper is concerned with a summary of two articles, which were published by the Copenhagen Business School in its publication "Probing the process in translation: methods and results" in 1999. The two articles were chosen because both of them are concerned with two essential issues that worry most translators: time pressure and dictionary availability…
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Choosing a Good Spanish English Translation Dictionary
English Spanish dictionaries come in all shapes, sizes, specialties, and mediums. There are paperback dictionaries, medical dictionaries, desktop dictionaries, electronic dictionaries, good dictionaries, and bad dictionaries …
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Online dictionary resources for patent, technical and medical translation from Japanese, German and French to English. Part 1 The Japan Patent Office Website.
I have always been intrigued by the very idea of a dictionary. Or at least since a very young age, I think I must have had an instinctive understanding of the value of a good dictionary. When I was 15 (1967), I found in the attic an unexpected treasure: an old Latin-Greek-German-Czech dictionary, published around 1920. It had more than 600 pages and it was in perfectly good shape except for the binding which was falling apart. I somehow found the money to have it bound again and it came in very handy because for the next 5 years or so I was quite obsessed with Latin. But passion for Latin proved to be a passing phase in the life of this teenager. French proved to be much more interesting, German much more useful, and Japanese … well, Japanese was a challenge that I just could not resist, which is why I started learning Japanese as a full time student at Charles University in Prague in 1975, and 30 years later, I am a pretty good beginner…
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New English-Polish and Polish-English Dictionaries: Some Problems Related to Legal, Financial and Insurance Terminology
Until recently Polish-English translators had to do with Jan Stanisławski's The Great English-Polish and Polish-English Dictionary or The Kosciuszko Foundation English-Polish and Polish-English Dictionary, both of which were published in the late '50s or early '60s. For nearly forty years they were the largest source of reference, although not always a reliable one due to errors/omissions and a lapse of time. They had a dozen or so reprints but their content remained basically unchanged. My 1998 edition of the Stanisławski Dictionary has a new modern and colorful cover, but it does not contain a large number of new speciaL terms related to computers, Internet, modern technology, biotechnology, etc., as well as terms corresponding to the new Polish political, economic and legal environment after the fall of Communism in the late '80s…
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