Equivalence in Bilingual Dictionaries: Types, Problems and Criticism

Abstract

This article has set out some of the major issues related to the composition of bilingual dictionaries, namely their functional aspect which helps determining the nature of the intended book, either reception-oriented or production oriented, depending on the type of audience to whom this work is to be presented. After that, the notion of equivalence started taking its position as being the central point of this paper. This latter was gradually reflected. That is to say that the analysis began with word class equivalence, and then it developed to deal with those consisting of two or more words (collocations), to arrive after that to those with longer lexical combinations through relying on different ideas and points of view by theorists descending from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds with different ideas and points of view. Most of them went even further to discuss its subtypes, as called by Heming Yong and Jing Peng, or its degrees as proposed by Monia Bayar 2007. This has led to another level of discussion, i.e. the criticism of some ideas that seemed illogical, especially that carried on zero equivalence, categorical correspondence and others. As I proceed, the discussion has moved to another level. That is of enquiring multiple methods and techniques used to provide naturally sound equivalents with respect to the disparities between languages.