Chinese-English Dictionary Research Articles

Robert Morrison이 편찬한 『五車韻府』의 音系

There are Mandarin textbooks in Qing Dynasty Mandarin：A Dictionary of the Chinese Language(五車韻府)compiled by Robert Morrison.『語言自邇集』compiled by Thomas Francis Wade.『漢語無師自明』compiled by Herbert Giles and『日日新』compiled by Frederick W. Baller. Morrison was an English missionary of Christ,who arrived in China in 1807.Morrison‘s “Chinese-English English-Chinese Dictionary”『漢英英漢詞典』was published in Macau in 1815-1823. Morrison’s “Chinese-English English-Chinese Dictionary”『漢英英漢詞典』is the first Chinese-English Dictionary in history, and “A Dictionary of the Chinese Language”(五車韻府)is the second one. Morrison has always paid great attention to the compilation of Chinese teaching materials and Dictionaries. Morrison once predicted: If the Qing Dynasty rule continues for a long time, then Tatar(Mandarin)will eventually win the orthodox status of Chinese. Morrison’s “A Dictionary of the Chinese Language”(五車韻府) is the earliest Chinese Dictionary compiled by the Christian Church. Since Morrison has come to China, the western evangelists such as Joseph Edkins, Samuel W. Williams, Frederick W. Baller, Chauncey Goodrich, and Western diplomats such as Thomas Wade, Herber Giles and others have mostly used “A Dictionary of the Chinese Language”(五車韻府) as the Chinese language material to learn Chinese. The research of “A Dictionary of the Chinese Language”(五車韻府) is of great significance to the face of spoken Chinese at that time.“A Dictionary of the Chinese Language”(五車韻府) records the face of Nanking Mandarin in the early 19th century.

Treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners

There is little doubt that phraseology is at the heart of all language use. This paper examines the treatment of phraseology in two influential Chinese–English dictionaries and four Chinese dictionaries for learners. Two high-frequency characters, namely eat and hit, were selected due to their highly polysemous and phraseological nature, and their phraseological behaviors examined in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese. The entries in the Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners for eat and hit were examined and their dictionary records compared with the results of the previous corpus-based study. The corpus-based identification and categorization of the phraseological behaviors of eat and hit revealed that some multi-character expressions could not be covered by the terms offered by the existing taxonomy (Sag et al., 2002). Accordingly, the taxonomy was revised for the appropriate categorization of Chinese phraseology. Comparisons between corpus-based findings and entry records in Chinese–English dictionaries showed a convergence in the overall treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries. By contrast, inconsistencies in the learners’ dictionaries were observed. It was also found that the two Chinese–English dictionaries agree with each other on the overall inclusion and exclusion of phrases. Again, we also observed many differences in the way phrases are treated between Chinese–English dictionaries and learners’ dictionaries and also among the four learners’ dictionaries. It is worth noting that hardly any of the verb-particle constructions observed in the corpus are included in the dictionaries under observation. We propose that these constructions should also be treated as phrases and the dictionaries would be more user-friendly if these phrases were not hidden in the other longer phrases, and were given the same status as the headwords. A larger corpus and sampling in the future would better characterize the taxonomy of Chinese phraseology and provide more conclusive findings.

On CEDU’s treatment of culture-bound lexical items under the beyond-equivalence principle

The Chinese–English Dictionary Unabridged (hereinafter abbreviated as CEDU) pursues a guiding principle of reserved descriptivism and includes far more culture-bound entries than other Chinese–English dictionaries, which has greatly increased the difficulty in dictionary-making. Accordingly, how CEDU has planned to treat culture-bound lexical items in principle and how it has tackled the difficulties in applying the principle deserves our attention. This study probes into the essence of the beyond-equivalence principle proposed by its editor-in-chief Lu Gusun and his ideas of acculturation and cultural over-flow. This study explores three major compensation operations in treating culture-bound lexical items: 1) to use lexicographical metalanguage to compensate for lacunae beyond equivalence, 2) to compensate for the treatment of an entry word through examples, 3) to use both foreignization and domestication to compensate one another in rendering equivalents.

Sinicization as glocalization in The Chinese English Dictionary

This study explores the Chineseness on different levels as displayed in the lexicographic text of The Chinese English Dictionary (unabridged, 1st volume, 2015) (CED) and interprets it as Sinicization informed by the spirit of glocalization. Adopting the discourse approach proposed by Chen (2019) as CLDS (Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies), it views CED as discourse and aims to examine and reveal how the dominant ideological powers within Chinese society may have borne on the dictionary's distinct Sinicizing efforts. It proposes that CED has effectively challenged the established norms of bilingual lexicography involving English in mainland China in its negotiating Chinese into sharing the status of target language with English and infusing the dictionary text with rich traditional Chinese culture. Meanwhile, CED also demonstrates strong glocalizing tendencies in its consistent 'de-ideologizing' efforts in the treatment of historic-political and cultural terms, as well as its unusual emphasis on acculturation as a translation guideline which serves well to universalize the local and vice versa.

Whither Chinese–English lexicography? – From a historical perspective

2020 marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of the second part of Robert Morrison’s A Dictionary of the Chinese Language which has been widely recognized as the first Chinese–English (hereinafter abbreviated to C–E) dictionary and signaled the beginning of C–E lexicography. From the late Qing Dynasty to the present, literally several hundred C–E dictionaries, small or large, have been compiled, though the number of noteworthy ones is rather limited. Nevertheless, research into C–E lexicography has gradually developed into a distinct field of study as witnessed by thousands of academic papers and over a dozen books devoted to its research. A search of (Chinese–English dictionary) as the keyword in CNKI, a database of journal articles, theses, and dissertations written in the Chinese language, came up with 8,365 results. Most of the discussions center round topics such as dictionary criticism, history of dictionary-making, theoretical construction, and case studies. The history of bilingual lexicography in China, for instance, was under-researched in the past as a result of the lack of original copies of early dictionaries, which, however, has been improved thanks to the reprinting and wide availability of such dictionaries since the beginning of the 21st century. Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (Heming Yong et al., 2008), for instance, devoted only a few pages to the earliest history of C–E lexicography which spans more than 70 years. But now dozens of academic papers and even several books (e.g. Yang, 2012; Gao, 2014) have been written about the early bilingual dictionary-makers and their lexicographical works, presenting a clear picture of the evolution of C–E lexicography. Today more than two decades into the 21st century, the C–E lexicography scene is not as crowded as its English–Chinese counterpart as there are only a few major players. The paper aims to present a brief history of C–E lexicography with a focus on lexicographical tradition and creativity, elaborate on the deficiencies or problems found within the major C–E dictionaries, and finally discuss the future directions of C–E lexicography.

From culture to (un)shared concept

Two theoretical constructs (the bilingual mental lexicon and the depth of processing framework) and the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic determinism plus related concepts (differentiation, codability, and Zift’s law) are incorporated into a framework in this paper to account for the representation of (cross-)cultural information in bilingual lexicography. After briefly introducing the theoretical framework, the paper goes on to discuss the representation of literal, conceptual, and cross-cultural aspects in the Chinese–English Dictionary (Unabridged) (henceforth the CEDU) in three sections: making explicit the implicit literal or etymological information to account for senses in use; acculturating expressions, definitions, and illustrative examples; and cultural immersion in exemplification appealing to both refined and popular tastes. Each section encompasses multilevel factors in the treatment of bilingual entries with a focus on (cross-) cultural representations.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ПЕРЕКЛАДУ МОВНОЇ ГРИ У ХУДОЖНЬОМУ ТЕКСТІ

The article is dedicated to the study of the ways of formation and the techniques of translation of the language game in artistic texts. The specific objective is to explore the linguistic units, which the most brightly show the language game, in translating artistic texts, and find the most effective tools translator can use to render them in the target languages (Ukrainian and Russian). The study investigates this issue by examining and analyzing the language game in the text of the English-language Xiaolu Guo’s novel “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers”. Translation of the language game in artistic texts is a challenge for any translator. The translator should be aware of the historical facts, culture, traditions, social and political life of the native speaker in order to make an adequate translation. The peculiarities of the language may be unknown to the people from other countries so the translator is the one who is responsible for the clarity of the translation. The translator should also adhere to the equivalence of the source language and target language texts and the text itself should make the same impression both on native speaker and on foreign language reader. In this context, the translators’ personality is of great importance, his skills and ability to consider a communicative situation, to keep the original text author’s intention and, the most important, to reproduce the language game. The author concludes that for an adequate translation different techniques of translation should be used while translating play on words. The perspective is seen in investigating play on words on the basis of other languages.

Beyond the mother tongue: language as cultural capital in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

ABSTRACT The paper investigates multilingual aesthetics in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). It argues that the novel refuses and undermines the family romance of the mother tongue by grounding its experimental form and language in Western poststructuralist theory. Yet, the text fictionalises the encounter with the other language as a love story, a fatal romance of conquest and profound metamorphosis thus revealing the complex status of English as cultural capital. As it exhibits multilingual strategies, the book also displays an elite cosmopolitism based on European literary canonical works that reinforces rather than discards monolingual ides of language and literature.

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Research on Urban and Rural Environmental Design and Redevelopment – a Case Study of Chengdu

There is a term called “Heart Land” in the West, and the Midwestern United States is known as the heart of the US in the English-Chinese dictionary. As the saying goes, “The route into Sichuan is more daunting than climbing the blue sky.” Chengdu, as a major inland city in Southwest China, is located in the so-called “Heart Land.” In the design of architectural environment, it blends the old style with the new, the local features with the international, and the urban characteristics with the rural, showing that the city is exceptionally inclusive and diverse.

Language representation in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: On the translation of ungrammatical idiolect and language-based jokes

AbstractXiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is a novel in which language has a special protagonism. The main character, Z, is a Chinese girl who goes to London to improve her basic English. Her idiolect is thus characterised by a great quantity of linguistic errors of different types. This lack of proficiency in English makes cross-cultural communication really difficult. Therefore, language becomes in this novel not only a characterisation tool, but also an essential aspect of the plot. Moreover, it is also a paramount source of humour, since there is plenty of jokes based, for instance, on puns, many of which derive from Z’s lack of linguistic competence. The main objective of this paper is to analyse language representation in the source text as well as in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the novel from the perspective of relevance theory. Out of the three versions, the Spanish one reflects the highest interpretive resemblance in this regard, whereas the Italian one occupies the opposite pole of the scale. With regard to the translation of wordplay, the pragmatic scenario is normally maintained in the TT, although there are statistically significant differences between the three versions and across different types of puns.

Translating the Translational: A Comparative Study of the Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese Translations of Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

The untranslatability of this particular novel does not come from the ‘resistant singularity’ claimed by world literature scholars like Emily Apter, but has to do instead with its inherently translational nature as a novel about intercultural (mis-)communication. Comparative close readings of the three versions published in Britain, Taiwan, and mainland China focus on paratexts, intra-textual visual design, and specific translational strategies. Caught between the established traditions of diasporic Chinese literature and liuxuesheng wenxue (‘overseas Chinese student writing’), A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and its Chinese-language translations offer insights into the dialectic between ‘minor’ literature and ‘world’ literature, discussed here with a particular focus on the global hegemony of the English language.

A corpus‐based approach to Chinese English lexis

AbstractThe study approaches the currency of Chinese English lexis from two perspectives. First, it creates a linguistic profile of 408 high‐frequency Chinese English terms extracted from the Chinese English Dictionary (CED) corpus by conducting a systematic coding and a statistical calculation of their linguistic features and by comparing the quantitative results with numerical distributions in the extant literature. Second, it evaluates the currency of 3484 Chinese English words in CED against six established corpora of world Englishes in GloWbE and ICE by calculating their frequency statistics in these six corpora and re‐evaluates the suitability of GloWbE and ICE for lexical variation by comparing the quantitatively different results generated by the two corpora. Findings of the study cast light on the tendencies of the linguistic behavior of the well‐assimilated Chinese English items and on the nature and feature of the variety data in GloWbE and ICE in the world Englishes scenario.

Jianhua Huang’s Lexicography and his Grand Dictionnaire Chinois–Français Contemporain (2014)

Le Grand Dictionnaire Chinois–Français Contemporain (GDCFC) was published in China in 2014. It is at present the largest dictionary of its kind and contains a number of innovative features. To know a dictionary and its design features, it helps to know its editor and his academic work. This is especially true of this dictionary, in that dictionary-making projects in China are in most cases chief-editor-oriented. Jianhua Huang, the chief editor of the GDCFC, accumulated rich experience in lexicographical practice and spent two decades exploring all aspects of theoretical lexicography before starting to compile the dictionary. This paper first addresses Huang’s lexicography as a preparation and underpinning for the GDCFC and then examines the dictionary itself. The examination is carried out at two levels. At the macrostructural level, the focus is mainly on its coverage and headword selection, in comparison to its sole source dictionary, A Modern Chinese Dictionary (6th edn, 2012). At the microstructural level, the focus is on sense translation, illustrative example allocation and translation, and grammatical and pragmatical labeling, in comparison with A Chinese–EnglishDictionary (3rd edn, 2010), a well-established Chinese–English counterpart. This examination reveals that the GDCFC is lexicographically well-designed and that it has to a large extent achieved the goal of combining a reference dictionary and a learner’s dictionary into one.

英语次要拟声词的语音理据及其翻译探究——以国内主要英汉词典例句为例

英语次要拟声词的语音理据及其翻译探究——以国内主要英汉词典例句为例

Evaluating popular online English-Chinese dictionaries in China by applying Lew and Szarowska’s (2017) evaluation framework

Abstract By applying Lew and Szarowska’s (2017) evaluation framework and methodology (with a few methodological enhancements made), this study evaluated six popular online English-Chinese dictionaries in China and produced some useful findings. First, Lew and Szarowska’s framework and methodology proved very successful in this study, demonstrating their viability in evaluating online bilingual dictionaries, although a few aspects where enhancements could be made were also identified. Second, the results of the evaluation of the six dictionaries in comparison with those from Lew and Szarowska (2017) suggest that while online dictionaries in the past few years seemed to have made improvements in some areas (e.g. increased coverage of lexical items including neologisms, technical words, and multiword expressions), they appeared to have shown little improvement with problems in some other areas (e.g. inadequate provision of usage, English variety, and part of speech labels and some inappropriate example sentences). Suggestions for addressing the existing problems are provided and implications for future research are discussed.

Equivalent varieties for culture-specific words in Chinese-English dictionaries

Abstract Given the popularity of Chinese culture among learners of Chinese as a Foreign language (CFL), a quality bilingual dictionary is of significance to provide cultural information for language activities. The present study collects a group of typical Chinese culture-specific words (CSWs) and examines the adoption of different equivalent varieties in four Chinese-English dictionaries when dealing with those CSWs. It shows that firstly, while borrowing turns out to be the least used way in the bilingual dictionaries, a combination of equivalents (either translational or explanatory) plus explanation is the major means adopted by Chinese bilingual lexicographers. Secondly, as compared to the dictionaries for general purposes, those intended for CFL learners prefer to include more CSWs and provide a larger amount of encyclopedic explanation for user’s orientation. Finally, the inappropriateness of some translational or explanatory equivalents suggests the necessity for a close scrutiny of various aspects in the process of equivalent identification, including sense discrimination between different TL words, context information of the potential equivalents, and cultural connotation of each constituent part of a TL equivalent. It is hoped that these findings may contribute to the improvement of Chinese-English learner’s dictionaries in the future.

The treatment of Taoist terms in Chinese-English dictionaries: a study based on Frame Semantics

Abstract This study argues for a frame semantic approach to the treatment of Taoist terms, which are Chinese culture-specific. It takes three Taoist aesthetic terms 虚(xu), 无(wu) and 静(jing) as a case study to explore how Chinese-English dictionaries can make use of semantic frames in the treatment of Taoist terms. As the study shows, a Taoist-aesthetics frame can be constructed in comparison with the Aesthetics frame in FrameNet. When treating Taoist terms, the core frame element “Entity” facilitates the meaning explanation by making the terms more intelligible. The non-core frame element “Circumstances” should be highlighted as it helps the dictionary to provide a more accurate definition of Taoist terms.

Word formation of Chinese English words: Evidence from the Chinese English Dictionary

AbstractThis study aims to cast light on the nature and features of word formation in the lexis of Chinese English and provide a synchronic formational analysis of Chinese English neologisms by adopting a sequential data‐driven approach with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The study has 1) constructed a hierarchical and quantificational four‐level structure for Chinese English word formation through meticulous coding, categorization, and calculation of 3522 headwords collected in the Chinese English Dictionary; and 2) revealed departures of the present taxonomy with extant models of indigenized varieties in both qualitative (coherence, inclusiveness, refinedness, adaptability) and quantitative measures (the changing status of formation processes, source languages, and transliteration systems). The study sheds significant insights into the motivation of Chinese English words, the status of the Chinese English variety, the sociolinguistic conditions of the variety, and word formation in the Expanding Circle where a dictionary of the variety is available.

The Application and Effectiveness of Prototype Theory in The New Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary

Abstract The New Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary (NOECD) is a bilingualized dictionary based on the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), which is likely the first dictionary to claim explicitly to put prototype theory into dictionary making. Assessments of the effectiveness of this move vary, but so far, no empirical study has been conducted to examine it. This paper reports two studies of the application of prototype theory in NOECD. The first regards the use of the theory in defining and sense organising, and the second concerns users’ perception of the effectiveness of the organisation of sense. The first study is qualitative, and it examines how prototype theory is exhibited in defining and sense organising. The second study is empirical and consists of a test of dictionary users’ vocabulary retention and some follow-up questions. In this second study, it was found that the prototype strategy adopted by NOECD, of identifying a core sense and grouping subsenses around it, contributed little to improving user efficiency in memorising word meanings. Several possible reasons are proposed to account for the ineffectiveness: the influence of L1, limitations of prototype theory, users’ inadequate dictionary skills and others. It is concluded that these challenges could be addressed by compiling nation-specific dictionaries for specific users. Dictionary training should be an inseparable part of language learning to improve users’ dictionary skills and awareness.