Department of Linguistics
Dictionary Assessment Project
DICTIONARY ASSESSMENT PROJECT
Project leader: Eddie Ronowicz
Assistant: Ms Renad Abbadi, a PhD student
The ultimate objective of the project is to gain information about the quality of available paper-based, electronic and web-based dictionaries and assessment of their usefulness to students and professional translators in solving translation problems. At the moment the project has been continuing for 2 years and is being carried out on a limited scale by consecutive groups of about 20 Master of T&I students enrolled in a Research Methods course each semester and carrying out individual projects.
Currently, a list of approximately 2,000 genuine translation problems identified by students as translation problems in a selection of texts from “The Economist” is used to test selected dictionaries in languages offered in the T&I postgraduate program. The dictionaries are tested for solutions to both comprehension and production problems in the context in which they appear in the text. The technique currently used in testing was developed by modifying elements of techniques used in a demonstration exercise called “Terminological Knowledge Acquisition: a case study” described in: Gile, D. (1995) Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training. John Benjamins Publishing Co. AN Amsterdam, the Netherlands., pp. 156-158)
The current objective of the study is to test as many dictionaries as possible using a large enough list of problems to consider our findings reliable to the point where we can give limited advice about individual dictionaries that are likely to be visited on the web or purchased by our T&I students. In other words, the reliability of results published on this website is limited, but useful to our translation and interpreting students who visit it. This is also the reason why we are not publishing recommendations, but reviews authored by individual students and edited by the two staff members working on the project.
The tools we use have severe limitations and we have just started another related project on how dictionaries are used by student and professional translators. The combined results from the two projects will hopefully help us define more accurately the features of an ideal dictionary for a translator and develop a more sophisticated tool for dictionary assessment.
Reviews of Dictionaries
| BILINGUAL ENGLISH/KOREAN DICTIONARIES | |
| BILINGUAL ENGLISH/SPANISH DICTIONARIES | |
| MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH DICTIONARIES |
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