Dictionaries

[Eric]

Whether you are a translator, or simply reading a book in a foreign language, or your own (!), dictionaries are a vital part of your equipment.

In a sense they are the most boring part of one's library, and there is a temptation to throw them all away, and rely on online ones. But beware. If you want to look up older words, words that were current some decades ago, you might find that you have to do quite a lot of searching online to get more than a one-word-synonym answer. And good dictionaries provide a context.

So if we forget translation altogether for the present, and concentrate on what you need to read a complex novel or write a letter in your mother-tongue, then it does no harm to use a time-tested dictionary. I personally use two English dictionaries a great deal, a Webster's from 1976 and an Oxford one from the early 1990s. I don't feel I need to be "with it" and "at the cutting edge" when it comes to ephemeral youth slang that will already be dated in twelve months' time. The internet will suffice there.

Then there are books beyond the straight dictionary, such as thesauri (Roget's is by far the most popular) and books that address current usage. Not so much grammar, but a clear-sighted view of the right word. And then there is punctuation. You would be surprised to see how often a comma in the right place improves comprehensibility.

All those dictionaries and other books prevent everything you write becoming a glorified SMS.

[Loki]

I like dictionaries. I like having them in my library, and I like having different kinds of dictionaries.
I have recently re-put on my shelves an old bilingual dictionary Italian-English/ English-Italian that probably belonged to my father, or to an uncle of mine, since the date of publication is 1971. But old as it is, I keep it there, it may come in handy. Sometimes I compare the definitions of a word when I'm not sure of its translation in my dictionaries.

A dictionary I've used from time to time is the thesaurus dictionary, which is helpful. I am sometimes surprise dto find how many synonyms a word has. It's a pity there no CD with it, as the searching is much quicker.

As I am curious by nature, I sometimes have a look at the etymological dictionary, to see where a word comes from, and in this way I can remember a new word better. There are some good online etymological dictionaries even online now.

[Eric]

Why dictionaries are boring, is because you can't read them like novels unless you pretend that they are the latest thing in postmodernism.

However, they are damned useful if, like me, you are interested in several different languages. So on my worktables alone I have dictionaries for Swedish, Estonian, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Latvian, German, plus a cupboard of ones I look at less, including Italian, Icelandic, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish, Romanian... And probably a few more on my bookshelves.

I don't collect these dictionaries as a hobby or fetish. It is simply that, over the years, I have attempted (and failed) to learn several languages, and either have a smattering, or a good knowledge, of others.

Obviously, I use English dictionaries the most, and after that Swedish and Estonian ones for my work. But once in a while I need to look up a word in other languages. And even after the advent of the internet, a paper & cardboard dictionary still has its value as, for instance, when the internet signal is cut off.

[Loki]

Yes, dictionaries are very helpful, and yet I can't find a way to use my new dictionary of Chinese, since I can't read ideograms, or whatever they are called (apparently ideograms are only the 5% of the Chinese characters). I just have the Italian-Chinese part, but still.
Another almost useless dictionary is my French one, as it does not give the pronunciation.

Sometimes I use the monolingual English dictionary, which is a good thing as it describes the word and as you may not be entirely sure of what the word means in your mother-tongue too.


I wonder how helpful may be a Latin dictionary as I have got, once you finish high school. Unless you need it for etymological reasons.

[Loki]

Why dictionaries are boring, is because you can't read them like novels unless you pretend that they are the latest thing in postmodernism.


I wonder if someone has read a dictionary from beginning to end. A great experience...

[lenz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html)

Wonder no more.

I often read dictionaries, opening at random and perusing for as long as I might read a chapter of a novel. There are laughs, shocks and words to remember, for use when impression is everything.

[Stiffelio]

I love dictionaries too. They are extremely useful either in your own mother tongue or in bilingual form. Thesaurus are also useful, especially if you are a writer or a translator.

[Loki]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html)

Wonder no more.

I often read dictionaries, opening at random and perusing for as long as I might read a chapter of a novel. There are laughs, shocks and words to remember, for use when impression is everything.

People are really crazy. You must be really stupid, and very rich, to read a big dictionary from beginning to end. And what you get out of it? Nothing. You can show off with people that you know the weirdest words, which I think you'll soon forget. People do anything to be talked about I think.

[Eric]

I do rather subscribe to the view that you must be a bit of a nutter to read a dictionary from beginning to end. Like some of you, I've opened a dictionary at random and been amused or absorbed by what I find there. But reading one from beginning to end is definitely within the bounds of what I would call word fetishism. This disease fells far more in a country such as Britain or the USA, where languages are a luxury, than in countries where you actually have to learn languages, as opposed to poring over them as cultural artefacts.

Mother-tongue dictionaries are vital if you want to write your principal language properly and with a wide vocabulary. I still find words in English that I have to look up, even though that language has been my bread-and-butter for years (I have taught English as Foreign or Second Language before I started translating regularly). I must say I cannot say that I "love" dictionaries; my relationship to them remains platonic. But especially if you live in a country where your mother-tongue is not spoken as the local mother-tongue, you certainly need as many reference books in your language (English in my case) as you can get. As I said before, the internet doesn't cover everything.

[Stiffelio]

I wouldn't go as far as reading a dictionary from cover to cover, but I've had fun delving into dictionaries and deliberately reading words other than the one I was searching for.

When I was young we used to play a game called "The Dictionary", in which a person would choose a rare word from the dictionary, keeping it to him/herself, and the rest of the players would write a definition for it. Then all definitions, including the true one, would be read out aloud and people would vote for it. Whoever got more votes for his definition would win the round. We would start off taking it very seriously but after two or three rounds the game would degenerate into belly-hugging hilarity, as people would write down the most outlandish definitions in an pseudo-dictionary-type language. But the end result was that we ended up learning a few new words. Is such a game played in your places?

[Loki]

Did you and your friend invented this game or is it a recurrent one in Argentina?!
It's not played here, unless you find others interested in the same things as you.

[lenz]

I've played "Dictionary" in Canada. It can get very funny, but sometimes boring when a player takes too much time to find a word that's obscure enough to fool everyone. They are threatened with violence, though, which is also amusing.

[Stiffelio]

I certainly didn't invent the Dictionary game and I don't think it was invented in my country but I think it was a game played by "salon" people of my parents' generation. I'm in my fifties now and the last time I played it I must have been around twenty-five. I don't think anybody plays it any longer. Young people have become "moronized" and they can barely speak or spell, let alone be interestes in this sort of cultivated games. But I agree with lenz: the game is more fun if you don't take it too seriously.

[Loki]

Well, yes, given that many young people do not know what a dictionary is I am not surprised that I have never heard of it.


Getting to other kinds of dictionaries, on my shelves, next to the thesaurus, stands my "Dictionary" of Quotations, although I'm not sure if we can actually call it that.

[Eric]

The definitions game that Stiffelio mentions in #10 is similar to what used to be a popular programme on British TV in the 1960s called "Call My Bluff" where the participants had to guess which of several definitions was right. Two were spoofs, one the real definition.

They always found the obscurist of words, but ones that were nevertheless to be found in the Oxford dictionary, a kind of British standard work.

The game was as amusing on TV as it will have been when played by the young people that Stiffelio knew.

I don't know who invented the game originally, but the only problem with this English version was that the words you learnt were usually pretty obscure and not always usable to increase your active vocabulary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_My_Bluff_(UK_game_show)