Types Of Dictionaries Research Articles

Idioms in the Arabic-English Dictionary

Despite the considerable research carried out in the field of bilingual lexicography, several aspects of the Arabic-English dictionary targeting translators remain a largely uncharted area. One such area is “idioms” and their various manifestations in this type of dictionary. The aim of this paper was to examine three interrelated issues. First, it sought to determine if the bilingual dictionary (BD) covers this particular lexical phenomenon exhaustively and systematically in its source language component. Secondly, it examined canonical variation and its representation in the dictionary. Finally, the paper looked into the entry point of full idioms, truncated forms and canonical variants. The analysis demonstrated that a significantly large number of Arabic idioms are not listed, that the coverage of idioms lacks consistency, and that lemmatization is typically characterized by chaos and subjectivity..

УЧЕБНЫЙ НОРМАТИВНО-СТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИЙ СЛОВАРЬ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА КАК ИНОСТРАННОГО: КОНЦЕПЦИЯ И СТРУКТУРА

The article is devoted to actual problems of creation of new types of learning dictionaries of Russian as a foreign language. On the basis of the modern theory and practice of Russian learning lexicography oriented to non-native speakers and on the basis of the problems of teaching of Russian in the contemporary sociocultural conditions it concludes , that among the most important areas of domestic academic lexicografy now should be considered the creation of special standart stylistic dictionaries containing comprehensive reflection of the stylistic system of the Russian language, stylistic characteristics of Russian words and standarts of the literary language and focused on the expansion of language, communication, cultural and linguistic competence of students in the field of Russian speech culture. These dictionaries are not currently available, and it comes into conflict with both the needs of society and the requirements of modern linguistics in teaching Russian as a foreign language. The aim of the article is a summary of the author’s conception of the complex standart stylistic dictionary of the Russian language culturalurological orientation designed for studying Russian as a foreign language, and based on the representation of complex information about the stylistic characteristics of the Russian words and practicing their skills in the use of normative speech. The article presents the results of studies on the preparation of the title of the dictionary, ongoing at the Regional Centre of the Russian language, Voronezh State Pedagogical University. It describes the theoretical bases of this lexicographical work and its preliminary design: the typological features of dictionary, its structure and organization entries. The novelty of the proposed lexicographical development tipe is determined by the characteristics of its organization, the nature of the language material derived not only from the modern Russian language dictionaries of various types, but also of special author’s corpuses as well as relying on modern methods of computer and corpus linguistics.

The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography ed. by Philip Durkin

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography ed. by Philip Durkin Antonette diPaolo Healey (bio) The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, edited by Philip Durkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiii + 700. $155.00. ISBN 978-0-19-969163-0. All dictionary lovers should have conveniently available on their bookshelves this learned yet accessible collection of thirty-seven essays, edited by Philip Durkin and written by both scholars and professional lexicographers. Let me begin by stating what this book is not. Although it appears in the Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics series and touches on linguistic issues, it is not largely focused on linguistics. Nor is it a “howto” manual for training lexicographers, although it speaks pragmatically about the decisions lexicographers face in their often fraught enterprise of creating, revising, and publishing a dictionary. And although individual essays, especially John Considine’s (605–15), are full of facts about the history of the practice, the collection is not a biography of lexicography. Instead, Durkin has given us an unparalleled gathering of essays by some of the best practitioners and theorists in the field of lexicography, whose insights are so rich and deep that students, scholars, and practitioners at every level will find something of value in this collection. The focus throughout is on lexicography as it is practiced today, its challenges, its opportunities, and its technological developments. As a glance at the “Contents” and Durkin’s “Introduction” (1–4) makes clear, the book is organized into four parts: The Synchronic Dictionary, encompassing the dictionary for general users, the monolingual dictionary for foreign learners of English, and the bilingual dictionary; Historical Dictionaries; Specialist Dictionaries, ten of which are surveyed; and Specific Topics, thirteen in all, ranging from theories of lexical semantics (Geeraerts, 425–38) to the practicalities of dictionary [End Page 114] production (Grundy and Rawlinson, 561–78).1 Advances in corpus linguistics, the development of electronic corpora, and the distributional power of the Internet emerge across the essays as the three most transformative features in today’s lexicography. Although many will dip in and out of this volume for specific points, making use of the massive “References” (617–77) and the helpful “Index” (679–98), few will read it consecutively chapter by chapter. That is a pity because one of the most impressive features of this Handbook is the controlling vision that selected and guided this comprehensive collection. Each chapter is lapidary-like, with clearly labeled and numbered sub-divisions that helpfully guide readers to the contents. The essays are uniformly good, and some of them are superb. If the latter were in an international competition, we would call them “best in show.” Many either illuminate a type of specialist dictionary through a case study or reveal commonalities among the various types, such as “Labelling and Metalanguage” (Brewer, 488–500), “Making Decisions about Inclusion and Exclusion” (Diamond, 532–45), or “Description and Prescription in Dictionaries” (Mugglestone, 546–60), etc. The essays in Part III, Specialist Dictionaries, for example, include an impressive range: place-name (Styles, 255–70), personal and surname (McClure, 271–91), pronouncing (Sangster, 292–309), spelling (Buchmann, 310–24), slang (Coleman, 325–37), etymological (Buchi, 338–49), regional and dialect (Upton, 381–92), scientific and technical (Becker, 393–407), and dead languages (Ashdowne, 350–66), together with the outlier diachronic and synchronic thesauruses (Kay and Alexander, 367–80). McClure, Coleman, and Buchi deserve particular mention for their vigorous articulation of best practices in their specialist dictionaries and for their willingness to point out the inadequacies of the standard dictionaries in their disciplines with lynx-eyed clarity. Few specialized types have been excluded, although Durkin expresses regret for the omission of essays on dictionaries of sign language and on the “lexicography of endangered languages, less-used languages, and less well-resourced languages” (4 and n.1). [End Page 115] The essays predominantly consider English-language dictionaries, although the lexicography of some other languages is also illustrated: French (Fontenelle, 44–61), Welsh (Hawke, 176–202), German (Buchmann, 310–24), Greek and Latin (Ashdowne, 350–66), and Austrian German (Dollinger, 590–603). As is evident, the volume is largely Eurocentric. Exceptionally wide-ranging in her illustrative examples for “Explaining Meaning in Bilingual...

EFL Teachers' and Students' Perceptions of Dictionary Use and Preferences

The present study provides insights into the perception of EFL teachers (Native and Non-native) and students of dictionary use. Participants were 99 (56 NS and 43 NNS) EFL teachers and 3993 (1815 male and 2178 female) students and were invited to respond to a questionnaires. 40 students participated in a follow-up interview. The results indicate that students overwhelmingly prefer bilingual dictionary to another type of dictionaries. Moreover, the students reported using online dictionaries and Google translator significantly more than print dictionaries. The study also revealed that meaning was reported to be the most lexical information sought by the subjects of the current study. Furthermore, the findings showed that most of the students refer to their dictionaries for word meaning and spelling but pay little attention to other aspects such as pronunciation, illustrated examples, and collocations. The findings revealed that EFL teachers held different perceptions on the role of the dictionary in their learning and teaching experiences. The results of the study suggest that the EFL teachers should incorporate ongoing training about dictionary use in the teaching-learning process and make the students aware of the extensive vocabulary input available in the standard dictionaries. Exposure to the parts of speech and collocation in dictionary entries can be useful for improving productive language abilities.

Five-dimensional Nernst branes from special geometry

We construct Nernst brane solutions, that is black branes with zero entropy density in the extremal limit, of FI-gauged minimal five-dimensional supergravity coupled to an arbitrary number of vector multiplets. While the scalars take specific constant values and dynamically determine the value of the cosmological constant in terms of the FI-parameters, the metric takes the form of a boosted AdS Schwarzschild black brane. This metric can be brought to the Carter-Novotny-Horsky form that has previously been observed to occur in certain limits of boosted D3-branes. By dimensional reduction to four dimensions we recover the four-dimensional Nernst branes of arXiv:1501.07863 and show how the five-dimensional lift resolves all their UV singularities. The dynamics of the compactification circle, which expands both in the UV and in the IR, plays a crucial role. At asymptotic infinity, the curvature singularity of the four-dimensional metric and the run-away behaviour of the four-dimensional scalar combine in such a way that the lifted solution becomes asymptotic to AdS5. Moreover, the existence of a finite chemical potential in four dimensions is related to fact that the compactification circle has a finite minimal value. While it is not clear immediately how to embed our solutions into string theory, we argue that the same type of dictionary as proposed for boosted D3-branes should apply, although with a lower amount of supersymmetry.

A Unified Theory of Union of Subspaces Representations for Period Estimation

Several popular period estimation techniques use union-of-subspaces models to represent periodic signals. The main idea behind these techniques is to compare the components of the signal along a set of subspaces representing different periods. Such techniques were shown to offer important advantages over traditional methods, such as those based on DFT. So far, most of these subspace techniques have been developed independent of each other, and there has not been a unified theory analyzing them from a common perspective. In this paper, all such methods are first unified under one general framework. Further, several fundamental aspects of such subspaces are investigated, such as the conditions under which a generic set of subspaces offers unique periodic decompositions, their minimum required dimensions, etc. A number of basic questions in the context of dictionaries spanning periodic signals are also answered. For example, what is the theoretically minimum number of atoms required in any type of dictionary, in order to be able to represent periods 1 ≤ P≤ P_(max)? For each period P, what should be the minimum dimension of the subspace of atoms representing the Pth period itself? Unlike in traditional Fourier dictionaries, it is shown that nonuniform and compact grids are crucial for period estimation. Interestingly, it will be seen that the Euler totient function from number theory plays an important role in providing the answers to all such questions.

A New Type of Lexicographic Product: Thesaurus of Text Strings. Field of EFL/ESL

The “Thesaurus of Text Strings: The field of EFL/ESL” (TTS) is a structured collection of text fragments extracted from various texts, both printed and digital, that deal with teaching and learning English as a foreign or second language. While the sublanguage of ELF/ESL has been vastly discussed in literature, the TTS is a radically new type of dictionary due to the nature of its constituent objects, the text strings. A text string (TS) is a lexicographic object of unique status; as such, it has not been used before. It is different from all other objects traditionally treated in dictionaries of various types, such as words, collocations, idioms, proverbs and other reproducible linguistic units. TSs have been extracted from specialized texts, they are supposed to reflect the various aspects, even the minute ones, of the referential situations presented in the texts. The TSs in the Thesaurus are arranged mostly according to the conceptual structure of the Foreign Languages Teaching Methodology (a deductive logical procedure, ‘head – bottom’), but on the lower, more concrete, levels of analysis the TSs have to be grouped following the opposite logical direction, ‘bottom – up’ as the Teaching Methodology concepts prove to be too general to differentiate between finer meaning distinctions of numerous TSs. The TTS supplies a considerable amount of carefully structured professional information in language form. It is aimed primarily at teachers of English who are not native speakers of the language and who wish to make their professional communication in English more authentic. It can also be used in classroom activities with students who are preparing for teaching careers. Thus, a conclusion may be justified that the TTS has both the theoretical significance for lexicography and the practical value as a good professional teaching material. The TTS may also be meaningfully considered against the background of today’s Corpus Linguistics. Though not a ‘true’ corpus per se, it has certain features that are essentially similar to those of contemporary linguistic corpora.

Using different types of dictionaries for improving reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language programs

Using different types of dictionaries for improving reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language programs

Dictionaries of Critically Endangered Languages: Focus on Users

Abstract The article describes specific features of dictionaries of endangered languages from the perspective of their user. Dictionaries of the Saami language – the language of the indigenous minority of the North – are used to describe the anthropocentric, cognitive and pragmatic approach to lexicographical description of culture. The article shows that the focus on the dictionary user becomes especially critical for the endangered languages. It proves that the purpose of such dictionaries is not only to preserve the knowledge that the speakers of the endangered language and bearers of the culture still keep, but also to revitalize this knowledge. The article states that contemporary lexicography must consider several factors for making an endangered language dictionary: the present state of the language in the language community and the scope of background knowledge of a language speaker that represents everyday level of the world cognition by indigenous minority. The article shows that the most relevant type of dictionary for the endangered languages is both a learner’s dictionary and a linguoculturological dictionary (active type). We emphasize that on the one hand the Saami dictionaries describe a culture that is often unknown even to most Saami culture bearers and on the other hand, the dictionaries are also intended for Saami who have no command of the native language. The peculiarities of the relevant dictionary comprise the fact that alongside the translation in the basic part of the dictionary there is a culturological commentary that as fully as possible reflects the knowledge of language speakers.

ТОЛКОВАНИЯ НАИМЕНОВАНИЙ МАСТИ ЛОШАДЕЙ

The article describes the interpretation system of the lexical units denoting the color coat of the horse in the Kalmyk language. It contains a table of lexical units denoting the color coat of horses with their interpretation, translations, synonyms, depending on the type of dictionary. It should be noted that in the Kalmyk language, some words denote color in general, and serve to denote the color of an animal (khar ‘black, (dark-)chestnut, black’), others call only the color coat (zeerd ‘chestnut’, ker ‘ bay’, saarl ‘ashen, mouse-coloured, dun’). Besides, the adjectives that are used to represent the coat color at the same time can act as an animal nicknames. As the format of the dictionary is explanatory, all the entries are given without translation in comparison with the existing dictionaries of the Kalmyk language. Though the descriptive method of the dictionary is the main one, in some cases, the descriptive-synonymous method is also used as they are both the best ones in interpreting the meanings of words, fully and accurately discovering the meanings of entry words. In square brackets the source of the word usage is indicated, which gives the name of the version of the epic “Jangar” in abbreviated form (see list of abbreviations), through a colon comes a song number - in Roman numerals, as in [EO: V], [MB: I], [BC: II]. The given vocabulary entries of the language of the Kalmyk heroic epic “Jangar” are the one way to test them. The results of the research provide a basis for improving practices of adequate interpretation and further developing cliches-interpretations for the other groups from the Explanatory dictionary of the language of the Kalmyk heroic epic “Jangar”.

THE EFFECTS OF MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES ON EFL LEARNING FOR STUDENTS AT DBE AT METU

Dictionaries are the most importantpart of second language acquistion since they are used at every level of language learning. People use them while writing, reading, watching movies or listening to music in the language they are learning. They may choose different dictionaries for different activities since there are different types of dictionaries including monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. We focused on these two types of dictionaries in this research and we examined reasons behind the usage of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries among ESL students at Metu DBE ( Department of Basic English)

Protean Statutory Interpretation in the Courts of Appeals

This article is the first in-depth empirical and doctrinal analysis of differences in statutory interpretation between the courts of appeals and the Supreme Court. It is also among the first to anticipate how the Supreme Court’s interpretive approach may shift with the passing of Justice Scalia. We begin by identifying several factors that may contribute to interpretive divergence between the two judicial levels, based on their different institutional structures and operational realities. In doing so, we discuss certain normative implications that may follow from the prospect of such interpretive divergence. We then examine how three circuit courts have used dictionaries and legislative history in three subject matter areas over the past decade, and compare these findings in detail to the interpretive approach taken by the Roberts Court in the same three fields. We determine that the appeals courts have followed a protean approach, adapting their usage patterns in ways that differ substantially from patterns in the Supreme Court. Appeals court judges use dictionaries far less relative to legislative history than do the justices; we found no semblance of the distinctive dictionary culture that is prevalent on the Roberts Court. In addition, the relative frequency of dictionary usage between the two court levels varies considerably depending on the subject area and the type of dictionary (general or legal). With respect to relative frequency for legislative history, the Supreme Court far more than the circuits courts invokes the record of changes in statutory text—either modified over multiple Congresses (statutory history) or developed in successive pre-enactment versions of a bill (drafting history). This “vertical history” is apparently more attractive, or less unattractive, to textualist justices than is traditional legislative history commentary such as committee reports. More broadly, circuit courts use legislative history regularly to resolve ambiguities, confirm apparent meaning, or simply explicate legislative intent, all without characterizing its legitimacy or systemic value. For both dictionaries and legislative history, the courts of appeals’ eclectic approach differs markedly from the Supreme Court’s more self-consciously articulated methodological path. We suggest how certain sources of interpretive divergence contribute to these differences, notably the justices’ interaction with all their colleagues in every case and their experience as objects of continuing media and congressional attention, some of which reflects attention that carries over from the judicial confirmation process. We conclude that the eclecticism of the appeals courts is likely to limit judicial discretion more effectively than the Supreme Court’s current approach which favors clear interpretive rules or priorities that are applied on a presumptively consistent basis.

Pedestrian detection from thermal images: A sparse representation based approach

Pedestrian detection, a key technology in computer vision, plays a paramount role in the applications of advanced driver assistant systems (ADASs) and autonomous vehicles. The objective of pedestrian detection is to identify and locate people in a dynamic environment so that accidents can be avoided. With significant variations introduced by illumination, occlusion, articulated pose, and complex background, pedestrian detection is a challenging task for visual perception. Different from visible images, thermal images are captured and presented with intensity maps based objects’ emissivity, and thus have an enhanced spectral range to make human beings perceptible from the cool background. In this study, a sparse representation based approach is proposed for pedestrian detection from thermal images. We first adopted the histogram of sparse code to represent image features and then detect pedestrian with the extracted features in an unimodal and a multimodal framework respectively. In the unimodal framework, two types of dictionaries, i.e. joint dictionary and individual dictionary, are built by learning from prepared training samples. In the multimodal framework, a weighted fusion scheme is proposed to further highlight the contributions from features with higher separability. To validate the proposed approach, experiments were conducted to compare with three widely used features: Haar wavelets (HWs), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and histogram of phase congruency (HPC) as well as two classification methods, i.e. AdaBoost and support vector machine (SVM). Experimental results on a publicly available data set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

A few lesser known Afrikaans dictionary monuments

Woordeboeke weerspieël nie net die woordeskat van 'n taal nie, maar dra ook by tot die standaardisering van 'n taal. Dit geld sowel woordeboeke waarin algemene taal as dié waarin die vaktaal bewerk word. Die Afrikaanse leksikografiese praktyk vertoon 'n uitgebreide tipologiese verskeidenheid, wat bekende en minder bekende woordeboeke en woordeboeksoorte insluit. Elke woordeboek kan aanspraak maak op monumentstatus, alhoewel talle woordeboeke se rol in die leksikografiese ontwikkeling van Afrikaans nie genoegsaam erken word nie. In hierdie artikel is die fokus op enkele minder bekende woordeboeke wat wel monumente van en vir Afrikaans is. Daar word aandag gegee aan woordeboeke wat gemeenskapsgedrewe produkte is en onder meer blyke gee van die kreatiewe woordskeppingskrag van die Afrikaanse taalgemeenskap. Daarbenewens word daar ook gewys op vernuwende leksikografiese produkte wat saamgestel is om aan spesifieke leksikografiese behoeftes van hulle teikengebruikers te voldoen.

Provision of Economic Security by Creating Innovation Network of Transnational Cluster Initiatives

1. Introduction Modern linguistics has gained a wealth of experience (OR: a great deal of) experience studying phenomena related to the description of human's occupation and his professional discourse, as well as professional term-system description. But nowadays scholars note modern shift to study languages not only in itself and for itself' but to studying it close connection with human consciousness, his cognition, culture and professional practice, i.e. shift toward closely connected to cognitive language study anthropological and civilizational linguistics (see such scholars as E.S. Kubryakova, L.V. Ivina, I.G. Ruzin, G. Lakoff, M. Johnson, A.G. Shaikhulov, Z.R. Pal'utina). So, the problem of a new approach to terminology study appears very important nowadays. The purpose of this article is to outline our experience of professional terminology study and description according to these modern science trends. Thus, for example, linguists state that scientific phenomena should be studied first and foremost according to their role for a human being, their assignment for human personality development and improvement (1, c. 212). Basing on this message we suppose that oil and gas sector terminology system should reflect true and clear understanding of the level of human knowledge of oil and gas industry.. Being constantly subjected to human purposeful activity, it constantly keeps being shaped and altered under the influence of the serving its needs science development level. The term system under study enables us to ascertain specific oil and gas field terminology characteristics every new term unit of which is to acquire similar structural and semantic characteristics. The study investigated the hypothesis that the methodology of cognitive-ideographic description is applicable for modern terminology systems and allows scholars and subject specialists to systematize terminology, identify structural, semantic, nominative, motivational and functional characteristics of composing them terms. 2. Method We can justify our idea of oil and gas term unification into a separate investigation object by our observation that the elements of this term-system represent structurally and communicatively interacting term units. Term units of the term system under study have common logical, structural and semantic features, uniform word form building and derivational characteristics stating logical and semantic relations between them and affecting term system formation. Studies modern lexicology stress the idea that full and thorough study of a language lexical system is possible only by compiling its thesaurus, where it is possible not only to outline paradigmatic relations but also show typical combination models of lexical units (Moskvin (1997), Shaikhulov (2001), Tabanakova (2001) and others). In their ideographic studies these scholars point out that not any single study of a language lexical system can fully depict its dividedness. This task can only be solved by compiling ideographic dictionaries the very core of which is based on the principle of studying the full volume of language lexical system, concurrently reflecting the basic principles of its formation--integrity, continuity, hierarchical pattern and inclusiveness. Ideographic dictionaries, as the scholars' state, make it possible to represent the whole aggregate of semantic fields, lexical-semantic groups and other lexeme amalgamations their co-relation and hierarchical organization (3, p. 43-57; 4, p. 5-22; 5, p. 234; 6, p. 20 and others). In line with the above we propose our holistic and systematic approach to building ideographic oil and gas business term unit's paradigm. Scholars believe ideographic dictionaries alongside with other types of dictionaries (analogical, associative, synonymic, semantic, subject-thematic and others) to be a means of a particular terminological systems term units description and at the same time enable us to represent the term system as a set of concepts each having own specific structure and comprising lexemes of relatively equal semantics. …

Словари и методика работы с ними на уроках русского языка в начальной школе

The paper provides evidence, that it is necessary to use different types of dictionaries, such as spelling dictionaries, pronouncing dictionaries
 and defining dictionaries, when teaching the Russian language to the primary school children. Specific features of each type of dictionaries
 are described. Further, the main methodical approaches to using dictionaries are outlined. Also provided are various kinds of assignments and
 exercises, which take into consideration age and psychological peculiarities of primary school children. The author places special emphasis on
 the role of pronouncing and defining dictionaries.

A study of English majors in a Chinese university as dictionary users

This study describes the natural dictionary-using behaviors of a group of first-year English majors at Fudan University, Shanghai. It aims to gain some insights into how Chinese students as competent English learners actually use and view their dictionaries in the highly digitalized era, as well as the most common problems they encounter in finding contextual meanings for the looked-up words and the possible causes. The students were set a dictionary consultation assignment which was a near replication of Nesi and Haill’s (Int J Lexicogr 15(4):277–305, 2002) study of the dictionary-using habits of international students at a British university. Observations are made on what types of dictionaries and which dictionaries these Chinese students normally use, revealing a general tendency among the students to use multiple dictionaries in the digital medium. The outcomes of dictionary consultation are closely examined to map out the dictionary look-up patterns by the Chinese students and to identify various look-up problems. The findings demonstrate a preference of reading L1 translations over L2 definitions for the looked-up word, certain unrealistic expectations for L1 translations offered in the dictionaries, and the consequent difficulty experienced in identifying the dictionary sub-entry appropriate for the word’s contextual meaning. Also manifest is the growing confidence of a younger generation of dictionary users regarding the critical opinions they have formed of dictionaries despite a minimum exposure to dictionary teaching. These firsthand data on dictionary use under natural conditionswill also be applied in the design of an introductory course on lexicography for undergraduates at the English department, Fudan University.

ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF ARABIC-MALAY BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES IN MALAYSIA

The emergence of Arabic language and Islamic religion in the Malay Archipelago which comprises the present day Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, part of the Philippines as well as southern Thailand gave birth to Islamic education through the medium of Arabic language. This was inevitable because of the mutual relationship between Arabic language and Islam. To have better understanding of the Quran as the primary source of Islam is to have mastery of Arabic language. Hence the Muslim scholars in the Malay Archipelago resorted to the writing of Arabic Malay dictionaries which could help in the proper understanding of Arabic texts such as the Quran and Hadith which were primarily in Arabic language. This effort continues from generation to another until modern times which gave rise to the production of different types of Arabic Malay bilingual dictionaries. Some of these dictionaries have contributed to the general education of the Malays for their precision in translation. This study however, is an attempt to examine and analyse the contributions of selected Malay Arabic dictionaries to the Malay world in order to determine their precision in translation from Arabic to Malay language with reference to their methodologies with the aim of suggesting standards by which an ideal and all-encompassing Arabic Malay bilingual dictionary could emerge.Keywords: Analysis, Impact, Arabic-Malay, Bilingual Dictionaries, Archipelago.

Adama Stanisława Krasińskiego zapomniany Słownik synonimów polskich i jego poprzednicy

On Adam Stanisław Krasiński’s forgotten Słownik synonimów polskich and its predecessorsThe paper consists of two parts. The first one covers characteristics of dictionaries (dated from XVIth to XIXth century), groups of synonyms regarding mainly the Latin (e.g. Gradus ad Parnassum), which also include equivalents of national languages (especially the Calagius three-language dictionary was examined and Czech-Latin dictionaries of synonyms dated XVIth century). The second part of the paper is a discussion over methodology of the first Slavic dictionary of synonyms (Słownik synonimów polskich [Dictionary of Polish Synonyms]) by A. S. Krasiński. Not-elaborated in details so far (in the subject-matter literature) the dictionary combines a few types of dictionaries (apart from the dictionary of synonyms): general dictionary of Polish language, dictionary of phrasal verbs, language correctness dictionary, book of quotations and proverbs and translational dictionary.

English Digital Dictionaries as Valuable Blended Learning Tools for Palestinian College Students

<p>Digital technology has become an indispensible aspect of foreign language learning around the globe especially in the case of college students who are often required to finish extensive reading assignments within a limited time period. Such pressure calls for the use of efficient tools such as digital dictionaries to help them achieve their academic purposes. Efficient use of such tools, however, would not be possible unless students are familiar with their special features so as to use them to their maximum advantage. This paper investigates the extent to which Palestinian college students are familiar with the features and advantages of different dictionary types especially digital ones. It also probes the effect of using certain activities on the students' level of awareness and dictionary use. A structured interview and a test were applied on a group of 148 Arts and Science students at two local universities. The interview measured the purposes (skills) that these dictionaries are used for and the domains they are used in. At a later stage in the experiment, these students were involved in an eight week activity that required them to use an online dictionary on a daily basis to complete an assignment. After the experiment, it was found that the frequency of dictionary use declined in the case of the print dictionary and increased remarkably in the case of the electronic (CD-Rom) and online dictionaries. It was also found that exposing students to the authentic language available in electronic dictionaries notably enhanced the students' overall language proficiency.</p>