Reversibility of Bilingual Dictionaries
The translator usually checks if the translation he/she has found in one part of the bilingual dictionary is also present in the other part. So, immediately a question is bound to arise: is it at all possible to expect regular reversibility in bilingual lexicography? Are there any constraints imposed on this kind of lexicographic confrontation?
Of course, one should always bear in mind that even today the making of bilingual dictionaries remains an arduous and unrewarding task, because there is never time enough for people to do the work properly. Instead of spending at least a week on the semantic confrontation of two or three English and Russian words the lexicographer is expected to complete the whole of the volume in a matter of couple of years. For this extralinguistic reason reversibility has never been aimed at. But is it at all possible to compile a twin bilingual dictionary in which one part would be the mirror of the other? Let us look at some groups of words which, presumably, would be the easiest to handle. A case in point is colour terms, a thematic group which has been studied in detail.
It does not require too much painstaking analysis to see that there exists a reasonable number of reversible colour terms:
But there is all the difference in the world between basic colour terms (white, black, yellow, etc.) and words like, for example, сиреневый – lilac and фиолетовый – violet. If фиолетовый is correctly translated as violet and сиреневый – lilac, then what is the English for лиловый which in monolingual Russian dictionaries is defined as the colour of lilac or violet?
It is quite clear that the moment we abandon basic colour terms all kinds of difficulties arise. As for сиреневый, лиловый, фиолетовый and lilac and violetthe trouble is that these words are on the periphery of the colour vocabulary and very few Russian speakers, especially men who are less sensitive to colours than women, can explain the difference between сиреневый and лиловый, on the one hand, and лиловый and фиолетовый, on the other. Here the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors come to the fore.
Besides, even if we take such colour terms which at first sight seem to be reversible it transpires that the corresponding collocations are incompatible. For example, brown and коричневый may seem absolute equivalents because in both languages there exists this notion and there is a separate word for it. But a closer study of various uses of the words shows that in actual fact they have little in common. In order to describe the colour of eyes, for example, the English use brownand hazel, whereas in Russian the word‑combination коричнеые глаза simply does not exist. There is only карие глаза. More than that the Russian adjective коричневый is never used to describe the human and horse’s hair. We use каштановыйfor the human hair, and буланый, гнедойfor the horse’s hair. In English chestnut describes the colour of both human and horse’s hair whereas the use of bay and sorrel is confined only to the description of the horse’s hair.
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It should be emphasized in this connection that the word‑combinations brown eyes and hazel eyes are cliche’d and idiomatic. Consequently, the colour terms brownand hazeldo not function here as separate full‑fledged words but are engulfed, as it were, by the word‑combination as a whole.
We face a different problem in the case of compounds:
The above words are not reversible in a shorter bilingual dictionary for the following reason: the name of every single object of nature, so long as it has its distinctive colour, can be used as a colour term but the morphology of such words in English and Russian is quite different. More than that, the pattern with the element‑coloured is not at all universal (for example, is seems to be much more natural to say olive‑green and not olive‑coloured). It follows that a lack of consistency in the description of two languages is caused, among other things, by their lexical morphology. Not every word may be granted the entry status.
The objection to the mechanical empirical collating of the twin dictionaries is further corroborated by the analysis of some other thematic groups. If, for instance we turn to the thematic group ‘Fauna’ we shall see that here there are very many reversible words:
The only real difficulty about viewing these words in terms of reversibility is that we should decide, which of some non‑equivalent names of birds, animals and fish must be included in the dictionaries. A case in point is the word белугаwhich is translated in the Russian English part as white sturgeon,but of course, nothing of the kind is mentioned in the English‑Russian part. Белуга is a very rare species of fish which is found in the Black, Azov, Caspian and Adriatic seas. So, the word is rather a zoological term than part of general literary language.
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It should also be emphasized in this connection that the given word is alien to Anglo‑Saxon culture and for this reason has no proper English equivalent.
Culturally embedded words (for example, смотрины, дача, поддевка in Russian, and darts, sheriff, pubin English) are generally transliterated and provided with an explanation in the foreign language entry. Such words are unique and for this reason reversibility is impossible.
So far we have considered those words which have tangible referents. The situation is no less difficult in the case of more abstract words. Let us turn to what can be described as the general scientific vocabulary, that is words most naturally used to impart intellective information, irrespective of whether the information is strictly scientific and pertains to exact or natural sciences, or whether the information is connected with findings, observations and generalizations in the broader field of the Humanities.
It is usually assumed that the main function of scientific prose is to prove certain points or assumptions; define and explain this or that phenomenon; pass on and sum up information; arrive at certain conclusions. Otherwise stated, the process of scientific research finds its reflection in the general scientific vocabulary.
Within the general scientific vocabulary there is, of course, a considerable number of rather long set phrases (gambits) which are important for the construction of discourse. They are said to be ‘set’ because they are not created in the flow of speech, but included as ready‑made units, for example, it is a well known fact that…, it should be noted that…, it should be added that…, as has been mentioned above… These phrases, however, are complex equivalents of the word and are, for this reason, are not considered in terms of reversibility. For the purposes of the present discussion we shall confine ourselves to the analysis of monolexemic units.
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The moment we turn to the study of the general scientific vocabulary as represented in the twin dictionaries, we cannot fail to observe that this lexical subsystem is more readily reversible than the ones considered above:
Conceivably the strongest single factor that has affected reversibility in this part of vocabulary is the existence of what Benjamin Whorf suggested to describe as the Average West European (AWE). Both in Russian and English the general scientific lexis forms a typical and very important aspect of the AWE. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the general scientific vocabulary is the basis of internationalizing the languages of the world.
However, even this fairly consistent part of the dictionaries under analysis presents some problems. The thing is that English words of Romance and Greek origin (and it is these words that form the basis of general scientific lexis in both languages) are semantically more complex than their Russian counterparts. It results in providing the majority of English words with two Russian equivalents: an etymologically allied word and its native synonym, for example:
aspect – аспект, вид
phenomenon – явление, феномен
It should be added that Russian words of Romance origin are stylistically marked and their continual use may make one’s style pompous and gobbledegookish.
The difference between Russian equivalents is reflected in collocations which are not always registered by dictionaries. Thus, if we compare the entries for the adjective social in Akhmanova’s and Katzner’s English‑Russian dictionaries we shall see that the adjective in question is provided with two equivalents which are used in different collocations:
social – социальный, общественный
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social insurance – социальное страхование
social welfare* – социальное обеспечение
social origin – социальное происхождение
social sciences* – общественные науки
social labour – общественный труд
social consciousness – общественное сознание
The collocations marked by * are registered by Akhmanova,
whereas Katzner does not explain the difference between the Russian adjectives.
As far as the Russian‑English section of the dictionary under discussion is concerned it is more consistent in the lexicographic treatment of etymologically identical words. In the vast majority of cases the Russian word is translated with the help of its etymon but this does not lead to the reversibility. On the contrary there is an obvious discrepancy between English‑Russian and Russian‑English sections in presenting etymons, for example:
English‑Russian section
argument – спор, дискуссия; довод
figurative – образный; переносный
Russian‑English section
аргумент – argument
фигуральный – figurative
It follows from what has been expounded above that reversibility presents many problems because there are words andwords. The greater part of the vocabulary does not lend itself to reversibility because of the clash of two cultures and differences in language structures.
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