Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Blaðsíða 44

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Orð og tunga
Iðunn 1989 is an lcelandic-English Dictionary, so as a starting point
we will say that Language 1 is Icelandic, the source language, and
Language 2, the target language, is English - yet the real issue is which
language community the specific user belongs to; on the face of it, for
an Icelandic-English dictionary, there is, traditionally, a simple equa-
tion:
Lang. Com- munity Source lang. Target lang. Activity / Function
1. Icelandic “native” lang. (Ice.) (L1) -¥ foreign lang. (Eng.) (L2) = ACTIVE /encoding (production)
2. English foreign lang. (Ice.) (L2) -* “native” lang. (Eng.) (L1) = PASSIVE /decoding (reception)
Diagram 1
If you belong to the Icelandic language community, that is if Icelandic
is the language you have grown up with, then you will be turning to
this dictionary principally to produce English, the L2, on the basis of
Icelandic language structure and vocabulary; your activity is an en-
coding activity and it is called "active"; it is concerned with produc-
tion.
If you belong to the English language community, the situation is
the reverse; you will be turning to the dictionary principally to under-
stand the foreign language, the L2, in this case Icelandic; your activity
is a decoding activity and it is called "passive"; it is concerned with
reception.
This is the simplest form of the equation as it is sometimes presen-
ted, but the real-world situation is more complex. As was neatly poin-
ted out more than ten years ago (Mugdan 1992: 19), there are other
ways of looking at especially the L2 side of the equation: the user
group that works from a foreign language, an L2, to a native or semi-
native L1 (in our case, an English native-speaker using an Icelandic-
English dictionary), can be engaged in a number of different activities:
a) understanding a text in a foreign language (L2) without trans-
lating into a mother tongue (reception of L2 [Icelandic]) (in other
words the passive/decoding activity in diagram 1)
b) translating a text from the foreign language (L2) into a mother