Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Page 47

Christopher Sanders: Bilingual Dictionaries oflcelandic
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bilingual dictionaries have special methods of marking an explana-
tion of something that has no true equivalent in the target language2
- Icelandic skýr would be an obvious example - and this is a practice
that it would be worth adopting in the future.
II.A.5. "Provide the necessary grammatical information for text
production in the L2." This is, according to the requirements of this
list, surely one of the two most significant failures of Iðunn 1989.
Should it perhaps have verb forms and variant spellings for the Eng-
lish equivalents for use by beginners in English? I will return to this
issue below (section 4).
The Russian-born Scerba was probably the first person to draw up
a list of the type we see in diagram 2; he saw the Ll-» L2 dictionary
as being principally a learner's dictionary and it has been argued that
he was often misunderstood. Other useful lists of desiderata for this
type of dictionary have been drawn up by subsequent scholars of lexi-
cography; these I have listed as "Kromann et al." based principally on
Kromann 1990 and Kromann et al. 1991. Here we find:
II.B.l. "A fundamental need for semantic discriminators"; each
numbered sense of a multi-sense word in Iðunn 1989 is indeed sup-
plied with a determinator or semantic discriminator in Icelandic in
brackets, e.g.fær adj.:
fær adj (f fær) 1. (duglegur) able, tal-
ented, competent vera ~ í e-u be
good at sth vera ~ um e-ð be capa-
ble of sth það er ekki öllum ~t not
everybody can do it ~ f flestan sjó
able to deal with almost anything
2. (farandi) passable vegurinn er
~ the road is passable honum eru
allir vegir ~ir he can do anything he
wants
Diagram 3
Then, in diagram 2, we have in section II.B.2. what Kromann calls
"Necessary inclusion of non-transparent collocations and idioms":
apart from relatively free collocations and fixed phrases, this category
includes prepositional usages; what is meant by "non-transparent"
here is that an awareness of how a combination of words works in
one of the languages will not necessarily enable successful production
2Dansk-Engelsk Ordbog-4 uses square brackets for this purpose.