At first sight, the concept of a bilingual dictionary appears simple: It is a dictionary which associates words of language L1 with words of L2 in offering two word lists:
So far, the bilingual dictionary appears to be a symmetrical thing, and such a notion would render fully understandable the fact the most bilingual print dictionaries have two volumes, one ‘L1 – L2’, the other ‘L2 – L1’.1 Maybe – so the simple-minded conception would go on – a bilingual electronic dictionary would even require only one entry table, pairing the cross-linguistically equivalent expressions in two fields such that the user could sort and access the database either by the content of field 1 or by the content of field 2.
On closer inspection, that conception may apply to a few (actually, quite a few) thoroughly bad glossaries. A good bilingual dictionary is something completely different:
As a consequence, the Larousse dictionary ‘Français – Anglais’ (and vice versa) is completely different from the Oxford dictionary ‘English – French’ (and vice versa). The former uses French as L1 and gives linguistic information on English; in the latter, it is the other way round. For instance, the ‘English – French’ volume of the latter tells the English speaker that the French expression designating the concept of ‘ox’ is bœuf, that it is a noun of masculine gender and that its plural is pronounced [bø]. If, instead, a French speaker confronted with an English text used the same volume, he would not need that information about French gender and pronunciation and would rather miss the information that the plural of ox is oxen.
Similarly, the Larousse ‘Anglais – Français’ tells the speaker of French that day means either ‘jour’ or ‘journée’. So much suffices for the French user to understand the English expression. The Oxford ‘English – French’, however, needs to tell the Englishman that his concept of ‘day’ must be articulated into two: If he means to say ‘day as a time measure unit’, the expression is jour, while if he means ‘day as a temporal gestalt with internal structure’, the expression is journée.
This finally leads us to a more adequate conception of the bilingual dictionary: A bilingual dictionary is a dictionary that explains the properties of the words of one language in terms of another language.
Translation between two languages proceeds in two opposite directions: from L1 to L2, and from L2 to L1. As a consequence, the translator needs the typical two-volume bilingual dictionary. Moreover, it follows from what has just been said that it makes a difference which of the two is the translator's user language: If a speaker of English translates between English and French, he needs a bilingual dictionary which treats English as L1, while if a speaker of French translates between the same two languages, he needs a bilingual dictionary that treats English as L2.
For most translators (and interpreters), the two languages involved are unequal in that one is their user language, the other is the foreign language. Consequently, the two translation directions are not symmetrical for them:
In the L1–L2 volume, the L2 equivalents to the L1 lemma are arranged by senses of the lemma. For instance, let L1 be German and L2 be English. The article hoffen in the Deutsch–Englisch volume of my dictionary2 begins thus:
hoffen tr, itr to hope (auf for); (mit Zuversicht) to trust (auf in), to reckon upon, to look forward (auf to); (erwarten) to expect, to await; ...
The dictionary thus differentiates among the senses of the lemma by adding contextual disambiguators. This happens no matter whether the lemma is actually polysemous from the point of view of L1 (which in this case it is not) or whether it is only L2 that distinguishes among a set of senses which are unified in the meaning of the L1 lemma. In this way, the dictionary helps the user in selecting that L2 expression which most closely fits the particular sense he wants to make.
In the L2–L1 volume, the definition section of the entry is essentially arranged by constructions of the lemma. For instance, the article hope in the Englisch–Deutsch volume of my dictionary reads as follows:
hope v hoffen (for auf); to ~ in vertrauen auf; I ~ so hoffentlich;
The dictionary thus differentiates according to the two prepositions the verb may govern. Finally, it provides the idiomatic German equivalent to a particular phrase involving the lemma. In this case, it is L1 which requires mentioning that case, since from the point of view of L2, the phrase is regular.
The infrastructure of the section describing the meaning of the lemma in a bilingual dictionary thus confirms what was said above: The L1–L2 volume takes an onomasiological approach, and therefore differentiation of the lemma concept at the higher levels follows semantic principles. Contrariwise, the L2–L1 volume takes a semasiological approach, and therefore differentiation of the lemma expression at the higher levels follows structural principles.
When it was said in §1 that an L2–L1 dictionary explains the meaning of L2 words in L1, the expression explain does not mean ‘define’. Definitions are the task of a monolingual dictionary. Instead, if L1 possesses a translation equivalent for an L2 item, this suffices. For instance, the online German-English dictionary by Pons translates German Monophthong by ‘pure vowel’ (29/07/2022). Quite apart from the detail that the explanation is wrong, the English translation of Monophthong is, of course, monophthong.
We turn back to the entry hoffen in my German-English dictionary (as quoted in the preceding section). The English words hope and expect overlap semantically and are, to that extent, near-synonyms. Now expect is mentioned in the above entry, as it contains the following component: ‘(erwarten) to expect, to await;’. In the same volume, we find s.v. erwarten, inter alia, ‘expect’ and ‘await’ (though not ‘hope’). The question here is: What is the function of the component quoted in the definition of hoffen?
The answer seems to be: The dictionary wants to help the user in his onomasiological task. The user has to pin down the concept that he means before he can look for its expression. If he were using a pure onomasiological dictionary, the concepts ‘hope’ (German hoffen) and ‘expect’ (German erwarten) would be adjacent in the relevant branch of the conceptual hierarchy. The user could then first sharpen his thought and decide whether he wants to say ‘hope’ or ‘expect’; and having thus chosen his concepts, he would then turn to the L1 – L2 dictionary to find out how they are expressed in L2. As things are, however, the word lists in both volumes of a bilingual dictionary are in alphabetical order. While this is okay for the L2 – L1 volume, since it has a semasiological perspective, it is an emergency solution for the L1 – L2 volume, which does not quite fit the latter's onomasiological function. Thus, the lemmas hoffen and erwarten are not adjacent in the macrostructure. The dictionary tries to make up for the defect by enriching the entry with information about semantically (though not physically) adjacent concepts.
The L1 – L2 dictionary cannot possibly treat semantic relations among lemmas systematically. For instance, the opposite of ‘hope’ is ‘fear’, but the dictionary does not provide a component ‘(befürchten) to fear’ in its definition of the lemma hoffen. It therefore remains doubtful whether such components as ‘(erwarten) to expect, to await’ s.v. hoffen should appear in a bilingual dictionary. If the German user actually wants to express ‘expect’, he should open the dictionary s.v. erwarten.
The upshot of the discussion is this:
In the L1 – L2 volume, no particular problem arises for synonymy in L2, since the synonymous items are simply enumerated under the L1 lemma. For synonymous lemmata of L1, there may be corresponding synonyms in L2, esp. if the languages are cognate. The German words Linguistik and Sprachwissenschaft are synonymous; both mean ‘linguistics’. The same is true of the Dutch words taalwetenschap and lingüistiek. What has just been said on semantic affinity may now be extended to synonymy: The Dutch-German dictionary should have lemmas of the following kind:
lingüistiek: Linguistik
taalwetenschap: Sprachwissenschaft
and vice versa. In other words, there should be no definition of the kind:
lingüístiek: Linguistik, Sprachwissenschaft.
It is not the task of a Dutch dictionary to teach a German that Linguistik and Sprachwissenschaft are synonymous.
If there are no corresponding synonyms in L2, there are two possible solutions for the L1 – L2 dictionary: Either the entries for the two L1 items are identical (apart from the lemma), or the entry for one of them reduces to a reference to the other one. For instance, the entry for beginnen ('begin') in my Greek dictionary reduces to "s. anfangen". For very elaborate entries, the latter solution will be more economic.
1. In looking up a foreign word in the L2 – L1 volume of a dictionary, the user will find a set of L1 equivalents. If the one that suits his context is among them, he will normally recognize it intuitively and thus solve his problem. There is usually no need to go back to the L1 – L2 volume in order to make sure that if one wanted to express that meaning in L2, one would indeed use that word.
If none of the meanings enumerated under the lemma fits the given context, then if it is not simply a bad dictionary, the user will guess that some semantic extension is taking place in his text. He will then try to apply his rules of semantics (of metaphor, metonymy etc.) to the meanings enumerated in the dictionary. That essentially exhausts his possibilities with respect to that dictionary.
2. Things are rather different if the user wants to express himself in L2. The German host wants to say to his English guest ‘I am afraid I can only offer you this guest-bed’, which he would express in German as
‘Kann ich Ihnen dieses Gästebett zumuten?’
and so he checks his Deutsch–Englisch dictionary for zumuten. There he finds:
zumuten tr to expect of s.o.; to impute; ...
which would lead him to say something like May I expect this guest-bed from you? or May I impute this guest-bed to you? However, since the German host has made experiences with dictionaries, he now turns to the Englisch–Deutsch volume of his dictionary and counterchecks the two English verbs. This particular dictionary does not even explain (s.v. expect) the construction expect sth. of s.o., let alone claim that it means ‘zumuten’. As for impute, the definition is ‘zuschreiben, zur Last legen, beimessen’. The first two equivalents are correct, and again correctly, zumuten does not show up here. At this point, the German host suspects that the concept of ‘zumuten’ is expressed neither one nor the other way in English. (There is, in fact, no English counterpart. A rather literal translation of the example is ‘May I burden you with this guest-bed?’, i.e. ‘May I expect you to put up with this guest-bed?’)
The example suffices to prove the necessity of counterchecking the information given by the L1 – L2 volume of a bilingual dictionary. The short way of doing this is to look up the equivalents offered in the other volume. An even safer way is to look them up in a monolingual L2 dictionary.
Hausmann 1977, ch. 1 and 5
Wahrig 1973, ch. 5.4
1 These two parts of a complete bilingual dictionary will henceforth be referred to as volumes, although they do not, of course, need to be physically two volumes.
2 It is a pocket dictionary printed in 1963.