Abstract
The lexicons of natural languages are not isomorphic. Reasons for the anisomorphism can be sought on three interrelated planes: language structure, extralinguistic reality, and conceptualisation. Simply put, the relevant differences may reside in the language, the world, the mind, or any combination of these. As a result, what goes under the name of <i>lexicographic equivalence</i> is a rather heterogeneous category. Growing awareness of this fact has resulted over the years in the creation of several tentative typologies of equivalence, one of which is presented below, together with a brief discussion of some strategies for dealing with imperfect equivalence. The remaining part of the article comprises a detailed analysis of a single problem encountered while preparing a new edition of a bilingual dictionary for Polish learners of English. The task at hand involved choosing a viable counterpart for a (Polish) semantic neologism from among a few (English) equivalence candidates. In the discussion, reference is made both to the metalexicographic categories introduced earlier and to such concepts developed by lexical (especially cognitive) semantics which may prove helpful in capturing the meaning differences between the source-language item and its competing target-language renditions. This micro-scale dissection of a single specimen demonstrates that we are still some way from being able to classify, let alone deal with, all the instances of imperfect interlingual correspondence that come our way. Persisting in the efforts to advance our understanding of the complex issues covered by the blanket term <i>lexicographic equivalence</i> thus seems crucial for improving the treatment of meaning in bilingual dictionaries.
Highlights
The remaining part of the article comprises a detailed analysis of a single problem encountered while preparing a new edition of a bilingual dictionary for Polish learners of English
Persisting in the efforts to advance our understanding of the complex issues covered by the blanket term lexicographic equivalence seems crucial for improving the treatment of meaning in bilingual dictionaries
Ecstasy, which features in the OALD and MEDAL examples of use, would never be thought of as a dopalacz in Polish. This points to a difference in meaning between designer drugs and the Polish term: dopalacze are substances whose chemical composition is deliberately kept secret, there is an air of mystery about them — these things are part of the concept
Summary
The naïve view of natural languages, which assumes that, for every language pair, any given lexical item found in one language can be matched semantically with its counterpart in the other, is fundamentally flawed. Cases of the first kind, which Zgusta (1971) sees as springing from a "difference in the inventory of non-designative items", are exemplified by situations in which a grammatical category present in one of the languages (e.g. English articles, Zulu ideophones) is absent from the other Those of the second kind (Zgusta's "difference in denotata"; Gouws's (1996) "referential gap") prototypically include geographically restricted features of the natural environment, as well as culture-specific customs, institutions and dishes. Consider the varying level of detail with which family relationships can be categorised linguistically: in some languages, special words exist for the maternal and paternal grandfather/grandmother/uncle or for various kinds of in-laws, despite the relationships themselves being, biologically speaking, the same for all humans This third, most complex category of mismatches, dependent on differences in conceptualisation, covers a multitude of non-obvious cases. Complex ideas are often so vague and unstable that they do not allow for a unanimously accepted definition — at least not out of context.
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