Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Page 51

Christopher Sanders: Bilingual Dictionaries of Icelandic
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(the "L2/passive") potentially limitless - one can sum up the dichot-
omy or potential conflict of interests between the "active" and "pas-
sive" dictionaries as follows: of enormous importance for the effec-
tiveness of an "active" or Ll—> L2 dictionary is the use of semantic
discriminators to assist the learner in finding the correct equivalent
in the target language; the so-called "passive" dictionary, on the other
hand, can be characterised by "the undifferentiated line-up of equival-
ents"; and an example of this would be ágengni f. in íslensk-dönsk orða-
bók 1976, which is glossed "overgreb, indtrængen, fremgang" without
any differentiation.
Kromann has theorised about how this potential conflict in prac-
tice should be resolved in one and the same dictionary:
In the microstructure the bifunctional dictionary should al-
ways meet the needs for encoding ['active'] activities. It
should be designed as an active dictionary and should con-
tain: 'meaning discriminators', grammatical constructions,
non-predictable collocations, fixed expressions, culture-
bound lexical units with encyclopedic information written
in the goal language. (1990: 24)
He was, in other words, prepared to allow the "active" function to
dominate in a bifunctional dictionary.
In an (unpublished) paper I gave at the Oslo Lexicographical con-
ference in 1991, after going through the same observations as we have
just tackled, I went on to investigate whether Kromann's conclusion
could be borne out by looking particularly at two bilingual dictionar-
ies that have foreign languages as their source language and Icelandic
as their target language (Norsk-Islandsk Ordbok / Norsk-íslensk orðabók
1987, and Svensk-islándsk ordbok / Sænsk-íslensk orðabók 1982.). My con-
clusion was supportive of Kromann: that where the passive element
was allowed to play a dominant role, the microstructure became bur-
densome and interfered with the active/encoding function - to put
it in another way: the more complex the vocabulary you introduce,
the more it will need to be commented - making comprehension of a
dictionary entry less and less certain.