Illustrative Examples in a Bilingual Decoding Dictionary: An (Un)necessary Component?

Abstract

The article discusses the principles underlying the inclusion of illustrative examples in a decoding English–Slovene dictionary. The inclusion of examples in decoding bilingual dictionaries can be justified by taking into account the semantic and grammatical differences between the source and the target languages. Among the differences between the dictionary equivalent, which represents the most frequent translation of the lemma in a particular sense, and the translation of the lemma in the illustrative example, the following should be highlighted: the differences in the part of speech; context-dependent translation of the lemma in the example; the one-word equivalent of the example; zero equivalence; and idiomatic translation of the example. All these differences are addressed and discussed in detail, together with the sample entries taken from a bilingual English–Slovene dictionary. The aim is to develop criteria for the selection of illustrative examples whose purpose is to supplement dictionary equivalent(s) in the grammatical, lexical, semantic and contextual senses. Apart from that, arguments for translating examples in the target language are put forward. The most important finding is that examples included in a bilingual decoding dictionary should be chosen carefully and should be translated into the target language, since lexical as well as grammatical changes in the translation of examples demand not only a high level of knowledge of both languages, but also translation abilities.Keywords: illustrative examples; bilingual decoding dictionary; semantic differences between source language (SL) and target language (TL); grammatical differences between SL and TL; translation of examples; transposition; context-dependent translation; one-word equivalent; zero equivalent; idiomatic translation