Guanghua Wu (chief editor). The Century Chinese-English Dictionary (Two volumes)

Abstract

The Century Chinese-English Dictionary (《世纪汉英大辞典》, henceforth TCCED) edited by the veteran Chinese lexicographer Wu Guanghua is a new large-size comprehensive general dictionary which boasts over 800,000 entries. TCCED has been funded by China’s ‘National Plan for the Compilation and Publication of Lexicographical Works (2013-2025)’. As one of the ‘nationally important books’ listed in China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), TCCED has inherited merits of Wu’s previous Chinese-English dictionaries such as Chinese-English Dictionary (1993, 1999), A Comprehensive Chinese-English Dictionary (2004, henceforth CCED), and The Chinese-English Dictionary (2010, third edition of Chinese-English Dictionary, henceforth TCED3), and its compilers have incorporated new features into the dictionary proper. The target users are not indicated in TCCED. On October 23, 2021, Zhu Yajun and Xu Ling with the dictionary publisher delivered a report entitled ‘On the Characteristics of The Century Chinese-English Dictionary’ at the 14th Symposium of the Commission of Bilingual Lexicography, the Lexicographical Society of China. Zhu and Xu pointed out the target users of the said dictionary, including translators, CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners, teachers, and researchers. The dictionary is also intended for foreign users who wish to know about Chinese history, culture, and life. Wang and Wu (2017: 157) summarized their main compilatory principle as user-friendliness. Considering the broad target users of TCCED, this reviewer focuses on the user-friendliness of the dictionary to its users, and translators in particular. Features of the dictionary in the inclusion and translation of entries, and exemplification that would be useful to translators are discussed in Sections 1 to 3 below while deficiencies in these aspects are addressed in Section 4. Several other representative major Chinese-English dictionaries (henceforth C-E dictionaries) are used to make comparisons with TCCED. These include the second edition of New Age Chinese-English Dictionary by Pan (2014, henceforth NACED2), the second edition of New Century Chinese-English Dictionary by Du (2016, henceforth NCCED2), and the above-mentioned CCED and TCED3.