Observations on Dictionary Making

Abstract

THE TASK of catching the living spirit of words in the narrow columns of a dictionary and translating it into terms of another language is certainly one of enormous difficulty. Considering the variety of particular meanings and connotations which individual words may develop within the context, and the divergencies in the finer details which usually exist even between comparatively equivalent expressions of two different languages, a certain imperfection will necessarily attend any bi-lingual dictionary. However, this does not mean that all the deficiencies we come across in works of this kind are inevitable as inherent in their very nature. It seems to me, indeed, that much is still left to be done in the direction of improving the organization of bi-lingual dictionaries and increasing their efficiency as aids in the study of foreign languages. It is hard to find any such dictionary which may be called up-to-date in the sense that it fully utilizes the refinements of semantic analysis elaborated in other connections. Even the best reputed of them tend to list alternative translations in a rather mechanical fashion with little care for developing and elucidating the significant power of a given word. This kind of information, gathered from dictionaries, frequently enough, becomes a source of misunderstandings and misconceptions in the mind of the student. The following pages are an attempt to outline ways of improvement, taking the organization of a German-English dictionary as a specific example. The proposed method of procedure evolves from critical observations on two current works of this kind. The first part of the study deals with some articles in J. Adler's German-English dictionary. Although this work has hot been reedited since 1903 it offers definite points of interest in terms of our discussion. As a matter of fact, it is still much used by readers of German texts in this country, and from the purely methodological point of view seems equal at least to any more recent publications in this field. Its deficiencies of method, by this same token, may be considered as characteristic of a certain system of dictionary-making which by no means belongs to the past. The second part analyzes the manner of, presentation in MuretSanders' German-English dictionary, known to be the leader among