Abstract
This article discusses how the Grand dictionnaire chinois–francais contemporain (GDCFC, 2014), one of the largest Chinese–French dictionaries, was designed and compiled. Due to the limited resources in the language pair of Chinese and French, GDCFC was designed as a bidirectional bilingual dictionary. To meet the needs of Chinese-speaking learners of French, the main user group, GDCFC extends the lemma list, and enriches the information of French equivalents in terms of their frequency, grammar and register. To be geared to the needs of French-speaking learners of Chinese, the secondary user group, GDCFC includes some headwords that fall into regional varieties of Chinese, and also provides useful information on the formulaicity and flexibility of Chinese characters (classifiers in particular). Some other features, such as the indication of POS and equivalents in context, and establishment of a semantic network of the nomenclature, were designed to benefit both groups of users. The making of this dictionary has implications for the compilation of other less-resourced bilingual dictionaries.
Highlights
The project of the Grand dictionnaire chinois–français contemporain (GDCFC), which lasted 16 years1, was completed in October 2014
The making of GDCFC has implications for the compilation of other lessresourced bilingual dictionaries. Dictionaries of this type often have to follow the design of bidirectional dictionaries7 (Hausmann and Werner 1991; Hannay 2003; Adamska-Sałaciak 2013), for "it is cheaper to produce one dictionary which will be sold in both markets than invest in two different ones" (AdamskaSałaciak 2013: 215)
This does not mean that a bidirectional dictionary is confined to a skeleton structure, with only equivalents given
Summary
The project of the Grand dictionnaire chinois–français contemporain (GDCFC), which lasted 16 years, was completed in October 2014. With the coverage of more than 100,000 entries and over 100,000 illustrative examples, GDCFC is regarded as one of the largest Chinese–French dictionaries ever made. Since its publication, this dictionary has won public acclaim. As far as the language pair of Chinese and French is concerned, the number of L2 Chinese learners in French-speaking countries and L2 French learners in China is quite small, and the resources (including dictionaries available) 3 for this language pair are quite limited. From the start of the dictionary project, GDCFC was designed to be a versatile bilingual dictionary with "a fusion of reception-oriented and production-oriented information" (Hannay 2003: 149). Just as Szende (2006: 20) claimed when it was still in preparation, this Chinese– French dictionary "vise à refléter la langue chinoise d'aujourd'hui dans toutes ses dimensions, intègre les besoins des deux publics et apporte différentes options de traduction, allant du sens littéral vers une expression authentiquement idiomatique".4
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