The two dictionaries above can be characterised as follows

(a) non-encyclopaedic – grownups’– monolingual – desk – ESL (thus mainly production) – general – synchronic (but has etymology, surprisingly) – alphabetical (but has pic-tures) – CD-ROM dictionary which

• has spoken pronunciations both in British and American English;

• offers a lot of grammatical information: computer mice may be mouses;

• has just two meanings;

• provides (also sentential) examples;

• refers you to dormouse(a seemingly similar word that has nothing to do with mice;

• advises that under cat you can find two mouseidioms;

• highlights cursor, a word that is not in the defining vocabulary

10.8. The two dictionaries in 6.1 can be characterised as follows:

• does not use rodentbut animalas superordinate

• offers a fairly everyday “definition” (with just one potentially unknown word: cursor) involving “where mice live”

(b) encyclopaedic – grownups’ – monolingual – college – native speaker – general – synchronic (but has etymology, not surprisingly) – alphabetical (has no pictures) – electronic dictionary, which

• has no spoken pronunciations, just transcription, only British English;

• offers some grammatical information;

• has six nominal meanings (!);

• has (three!) verbal meanings in addition to the noun;

• includes slang, and technical/specialised use;

• provides no examples;

• offers no idioms;

• uses rodentas a superordinate for mouse, and offers a “scientific” – encyclopaedic – def-inition including Latin terms.

Points to Ponder

1. What kind of a dictionary do Hungarians typically have in mind when they say “dic-tionary”? And an English-speaking person?

2. Which language do you think has a lot more word forms that happen to be identical, English or Hungarian? (Hint: bear–bear, still–still; követ–követ, török–török) For bear, please consider Item 6 in the Points to ponder section of Chapter 5.

3. Probably – and hopefully, and expectedly by now – you have more than one (English, or perhaps other) dictionary. Try and classify them using the criteria in the chapter.

4. Field work (a): Gather 10 words that you think have recently appeared in the Hun-garian lexicon. Provide a “professional” definition for them. Which of them will be around in 5 years, do you think? Those that will deserve an entry in a monolingual

“értelmező” dictionary.

5. Field work (b): Gather 10 English words that you think have recently appeared. Find a Hungarian equi¬valent, or translation, for them, and make their dictionary entry.

6. Field work (c): (You should only tackle this after you have covered both this chapter and Ch 5).

Meanings change fast. One meaning of the English word semantics is (almost) pejo-rative. That mean¬ing is employed, e.g., when someone says, “That’s just semantics”.

Find out what this means. Trans¬late this into Hungarian. Is it fair that the word should have this meaning? Why (not)?

This use of semantics is mentioned, e.g. on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Semantics.

Note, however, that (on the Internet a lot more than elsewhere, I’m afraid) all is not gold that glitters.

Suggested Reading

Crystal, D. (ed.) (1997): The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. 2nd ed. Ch. III–18. CUP A wonderful volume, offers a wealth of – textual & pictorial – information on all as-pects of language & English. Everything you should, and will ever have to, know about language.

Jackson, H. (1988): Words and their meaning. Longman

A down-to-earth book specifically devoted to questions of (basically: English) lexicol-ogy and lexicography, i.e. meaning in language and dictionaries.

Landau, S. L. (2001): Dictionaries. The art and craft of lexicography. 2nd ed. CUP

A book on lexicography (more American than British): on how dictionaries are re-searched and written, with emphasis on computer technology. Examines and explains all features of dictionaries; illustrations from up-to-date dictionaries.

Jackson, H. (2002): Lexicography. Routledge

Reader-friendly and accessible book devoted to (basically: English) lexicography.

Suggested Reading

et us return to Isaac and his apple. Why does the apple fall down?Translate it into Hungarian: Miért esik az alma lefelé?Which word is which? We can list the Eng-lish-Hungarian word pairs:

why= miért; apple= alma; down= lefelé; fall= ?esik; does= ???

These are called equivalences. But there seem to be a few problems.

Is the verb fall really esik? That is what you would find in most dictionaries:

fall (v) (fell, fallen): 1. esik. Maybe the equivalent should include esem, esel, esünk, estek and esnek, all together. Although esik is correct in the sentence above, if you back-trans-late it, it would be falls. What is even more difficult to explain is the Hungarian equiv-alent of does. There is no single Hungarian word that does the same thing as does does.

So what is the Hungarian equivalent? It has none. But both languages ask a question, albeit differently. Whyseems to be a simple case, any beginner could translate it. Or could it mean something other than miért? Why certainly it could! Hát hogyne! So the context is crucial, and explains why fallin the meaning of autumnwould be a bad choice. Apple refers to the fruit, but it also appears in the idiomatic cliché the apple of their eye, which is szemük fényeand not *szemük almája. In this latter case the unit of translation is not the word.

Indeed, is equivalence to be sought in words or phrases or clauses, or perhaps entire texts?

Are there equivalences at all? Read on to find out more.

Have you read a play by Shakespeare? Or any part of the Bible? Or the instructions on how to use a DVD- player? The chances are good that your answer to these questions was “Yes”.

The next question is whether you read any of these in the original and now I expect the an-swer to be “No”. A question at the core of translation studies is whether the translation is the ‘same’ work as the original. If it is not, in what ways does it differ? If it is, how is this possible? In fact, how can we provide an answer to this question? These are some of the questions we will look at in this chapter.

The field of translation studies is a new one, although the phenomenon of translation is probably as old as language itself. Translators, thinking about translation in previous

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