Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Qupperneq 55

Christopher Sanders: Bilingual Dictionaries oflcelandic
53
4 Icelandic bilingual dictionaries in the future:
general perspectives
In the process of putting together this paper, I realised something that
is perhaps already received opinion for many: the idea that there really
is only space for one professional bilingual dictionary for each pair of
languages, I mean space for only one English-Icelandic dictionary and
one Icelandic-English is, on reflection, although it was used above as
a premiss for part of my discussion (section 3), essentially incorrect.
To start with, we will soon be seeing special dictionaries for immig-
rants, in the form of the LEXIN project. Secondly, there is an Ensk-
íslensk skólaorðabók (alongside Sören Sörenson's major Islensk-ensk orða-
bók), and a Dönsk-íslensk skólaorðabók (alongside Halldóra Jónsdóttir's
very recent replacement for the 1992 edition, Dönsk-íslensk orðabók-2),
and they both seem to be very operational. If we then look at the dic-
tionaries which have Icelandic as their source language it ought to be
possible to design the shorter versions of them (that is those contain-
ing between 20,000 and 30,000 lemmata) both as school dictionaries
for the young Icelanders learning the foreign language and for the
beginning foreign student leaming Icelandic.6 By thinking of these
combined school/foreign-learner dictionaries as being as far as pos-
sible balanced in their "active" and "passive" functions but with a
leaning towards the "active" for the sake of simplicity, we could al-
low the larger dictionaries (those with 50,000 lemmata or more), on
the other hand, to be more influenced by the "passive" requirements,
thus allowing them to be more complicated - knowing that their target
group is partly the older and partly the more experienced and soph-
isticated user. It might to a large extent perhaps be viewed as an issue
that was closely related to the size of the dictionary. An example of
what I mean here by "allowing them to be more complicated" is that
a phrase in Icelandic could be provided with two or more alternatives
in English with some explanation or specification of the appropriate,
varied usage for each of them.
6In a dictionary of this type it would be relevant to reconsider whether declension
details for English should be included, cf. section II.A.5. in diagram 2 above and my
subsequent comment in the text.