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Note
1

An English translation of the table of contents is available at http://vsites.unb.br/

il/let/welker/LP_contents

References
A. Dictionaries.
Adam, J. (ed.) 2007. Longman Business English Dictionary. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Parkingson, D. (ed.) 2005. Oxford Business English Dictionary for Learners of English.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Instituto Superior de L nguas e Administracao (ISLA-Lisboa)
ana.frankenberg@gmail.com
doi:10.1093/ijl/ecq009
Advance access publication 26 February 2010

GaoYongwei (ed.) A New English-Chinese Dictionary (4th edition). Shanghai: Shanghai

Translation Publishing House. 2009.VII+1928 pages. ISBN 978 -7-5327- 4741-2. Price:
88 RMB.
A New English-Chinese Dictionary (hh
ii, henceforth NECD) is a
classic of Chinese bilingual lexicography first edited in 1975 by Ge
Chuangui, Lu Gusun, Xue Shiqi and others. This medium-sized and monodirectional general-purpose dictionary has been very popular with English learners and translators in China ever since its publication in the last century, with
its accumulated sales volume now over 12 million. In 2008, it was listed among
International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 23 No. 2.
# 2009 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Downloaded from http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universitatea Transilvania on October 28, 2013

B. Other Literature.
Dolezal, F. and D. McCreary 1999. Pedagogical Lexicography Today. A Critical
Bibliography on Learners Dictionaries with Special Emphasis on Language Learners
and Dictionary Users. Tubigen: Niemeyer.
Welker, H. 2004. Dicionarios: Uma Pequena Introducao a` Lexicografia. Bras lia:
Thesaurus.
Welker, H. 2006. O Uso de Dicionarios. Panorama Geral das Pesquisas Empricas.
Bras lia: Thesaurus.
Welker, H. 2008. Lexicografia Pedagogica: Definicoes, Historia, Peculiaredades.
In Xatara, C., Bevilacqua, C. and Humble, P. (eds), Lexicografia Pedagogica:
Pesquisas e Perspectivas. Florianopolis: UFSC/NUT. Available at http://www.cilp.
ufsc.br/LEXICOPED.pdf (accessed 30 Jan 2010).
Zofgen, E. 1994. Lernerworterbucher in Theorie und Praxis. Ein Beitrag zur
Metalexikographie mit besonderer Berucksichtigung des Franzosischen. Tubingen:
Niemeyer.

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the 300 most influential books in the thirty years of the Opening-up and
Reform Policy in China. To keep abreast with the times, the NECD has undergone regular revisions over the years, with revised editions coming out in 1978,
1985, and 2000 respectively. The present work is the fourth edition (henceforth
NECD4) revised by Gao Yongwei and published in July 2009.
Following the practice of descriptivism in dictionary compilation, the
NECD4 has omitted some archaic words and senses which are not in current
use and added more than 5000 new words, new senses, and new uses of words
to reflect ongoing changes in various fields of society. For example, it includes
new words in the field of ecology and environmental protection, such as ecoanxiety, ecocentrism, ecocertification, green-collar, hypermiling, and plastic
soup, in information technology, such as cyberathlete, cybersquatting, blogroll,
videocast, vlog, and in various aspects of social life, such as barefoot luxury,
camgirl, Facebook, helicopter parent, staycation, mobisode and dumpster diving.
The editor-in-chief, Gao Yongwei, is an expert at tracking and analyzing
neologisms. All the new words and senses are taken, after careful selection and
balancing, from various websites, newspapers and journals, and checked
against famous search-engines and recent dictionaries of new English words.
It is remarkable that a bilingual dictionary compiled by non-native English
speakers could keep abreast with monolingual dictionaries compiled by
native English speakers containing the latest developments in the English lexicon. In addition, the NECD4 is one of the first English-Chinese dictionaries to
systematically cover new lexical items in computer-mediated communication
and text messaging. A special appendix lists 297 abbreviations such as @
(at
), 2b, 2B (to be,
), aak (asleep at keyboard
), bbl (be back later
), cu (see you
), sos ( someone
special
same old shit
), and ZZZ ( sleeping
bored
tired
). These items were taken from popular
English electronic journals and manuals, as well as academic works, and with
reference to authoritative English dictionaries of netspeak. The second edition
of the English-Chinese Dictionary (hh
ii, henceforth ECD2), an
unabridged and authoritative bilingual dictionary edited by Lu Gusun, also
includes in its appendix a list of network abbreviations, but on a smaller scale
and all capitalized. This practice by the ECD2 and the NECD4 has implications for Chinese monolingual lexicography. With the growth of netspeak,
some abbreviations of network communication have found their way into peoples daily lives, yet very few have ever been recorded in Chinese monolingual
dictionaries. It is likely that Chinese monolingual dictionaries will draw inspiration from the ECD2 and the NECD4 and begin to pay attention to abbreviations of network communication.
Another feature of the NECD4 is that it includes in the main text some 600
discrimination boxes explaining fine distinctions between English synonyms and
unexpected differences between English and Chinese. The discrimination boxes

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are designed from the perspective of Chinese compilers and target those words
and usages which are thought to be confusing for learners of English in China,
providing valuable assistance in language decoding as well as encoding, e.g.:
remember / recall / recollect / remind
:  remember
: I remember meeting him at a party once.  recall
: I cant recall who gave me the book.  recollect
: She tried to recollect the words to that old
song.  remind
,
: The song reminds me
of someone I used to know.
,
,
a 15% discount 
,
rebate

,
rebate
,
a $ 300 cash rebate, an income tax

By offering discrimination boxes, the NECD4, traditionally a generalpurpose dictionary, is now taking on some features of a pedagogical dictionary.
Although the NECD was originally designed for both language reception
and production, it has been heavily used for decoding tasks such as reading in
English and translation from English to Chinese. The NECD4 takes great
pains to enhance its encoding function. In addition to the above-mentioned
boxes, it provides a variety of information for headwords including:
(1) syntactic information, e.g.:
behove . . . [
it] vt
lest . . . [
should
. . .2 [
fear, worry
that] . . .
(2) lexical information, e.g.:
behave . . . [
]
kaput . . . [
] < >
police . . . [
]1[
the ]
,
... 2 [
]
= policemen
(3) pragmatic information, e.g.:
behold . . . vi ,
[
,
if . . . 1[
]
... 2 [
] ... 3 [
,
] . . .7 [
] . . . and

...
]1
,

towards

. . .. . .

] ...
] . . .6 [
,

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(4) collocational information, e.g.:

consist . . . 1 . . .
, ...
(of . . . 2
,
>
,
(with) . . .
graze2 . . . vi
against, along, by, past

239

(in) . . . 3 <

With regard to the decoding function, the NECD4 has revised the equivalents for hundreds of encyclopedic entries in strict accordance with the standards stipulated by the Chinese National Assessment Committee for Scientific
and Technological Terms. For example, Caesarean section is translated into
, the standard medical term in Chinese, rather than
; and
the equivalent to epistasis is modified as
instead of
,
.
The NECD4 has also revised the equivalents to some linguistic headwords. For
example, voice mail is revised from
,
to
;
discourse is changed from
to
,
. In addition, the NECD4 has
added or altered labels for Chinese equivalents. For example, the stylistic label
for bats
is changed from < > (slang) to < >< >
(spoken, old-fashioned); the stylistic label < > (derogatory) is added to
cack-handed
. Furthermore, it has adjusted the sense ordering for
some entries. For example, the senses of cakewalk in the previous edition were
arranged as: 1
2
, while in the NECD4, they are reordered according to
the frequency of use: 1< >
2
.
Previous editions of the NECD had included compounds as run-ons in their
main entries to save space and reduce costs. The fourth edition changes this
kind of entry format and grants compounds the status of entry headwords. For
example, it alphabetically lists bathing beauty, bathing cap, bathing costume,
bathing suit as separate entry headwords instead of cramming them into the
main entry of bathing. As mentioned in the preface to the NECD4 by Lu
Gusun, this practice has at least three advantages: 1) enhancing the
user-friendly principle by making compounds more conspicuous and, thus,
easier to locate; 2) providing more space for further derivation and exemplification of compounds; and most importantly 3) improving the status of compounds, thus making dictionary users aware of the prominent role of
compounds in the English lexicon.
The NECD4 is also superior in typography to previous editions in that all
headwords and illustrations are printed in green which makes them more
conspicuous and more comfortable to read. This feature demonstrates how
the traditional Chinese bilingual dictionary is adopting the international
trend toward multimodality in lexicography the trend towards using
colors, pictures, graphics, typography and space as vehicles of meaning
construction.

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Without a doubt, the NECD4 has made remarkable improvements both in

its macrostructure and microstructure; and yet, excellent as it is, it also has
some deficiencies and defects. It is not especially well-balanced in vocabulary
coverage, particularly for encyclopedic entries. It includes a great number of
encyclopedic headwords in various disciplines such as chemistry, electronics,
geology, physics, law, music and zoology, but fails to cover the field of literature. As a result, there is Shakespearean but no Shakespeare; Homeric but no
Homer. Likewise, there is descriptivism but no prescriptivism, and some colloquial expressions such as gonna are not included.
A bilingual dictionary relates the vocabularies of two languages by means of
translation equivalents; however, finding suitable lexical equivalents is a notoriously difficult task, especially in pairs of languages from different cultures
(Hartmann & James 2000). Although the NECD4 has improved the equivalents for hundreds of headwords, some problems still remain. For example,
reception centre is wrongly translated as
and should be
replaced by (
)
. Reception
desk, translated as (
)
,
, is obviously not restricted to
hotels. The equivalent to body clock should be
rather than
.
Cardinal should be rendered by its standard term
in addition to the
more popular term
. The translation of google,
...
, should be modified as
Google
,
.
Moreover, some equivalents should be supplemented with pragmatic or etymological information. For example, Lolita is translated as
which may bewilder users and should be clarified with its etymological information
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita . And for Bottoms up! the
simple translation
without the necessary pragmatic information
may wrongly lead users to believe that it can apply to a
broader range of situations than is actually the case. Also, some important
senses of headwords are missing, which may lead to problems in decoding
tasks. For example, calculated was given four senses in previous editions, yet
in the new edition it is reduced to only one sense
. Given
the size and type of the dictionary, at least one more sense should be added,
i.e.
,
.
The importance of illustrative examples and their translations in bilingual
lexicography has been stressed in a good deal of research literature (e.g. Li &
Zhou 2000, Wan 2006, Chen 2006). Considering its size, and its functions for
both reception and production, the NECD4 is not sufficiently satisfying in this
regard. While it is reasonable to dispense with examples for encyclopedic
entries, it seems somehow undesirable to do so for linguistic headwords such
as abortive and invasive, which are both provided with at least one example in
the Big Five. It would enhance the encoding function of the dictionary to offer
richer examples. Some illustrative examples for headwords are not as typical as
could be desired. For example, forgive (vt 1
,
) is given two

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241

sentence examples: He forgave the children their trespasses and He was forgiven
his offences. Actually, forgive is more commonly used in the sentence pattern
forgive sb (for sth /doing sth). Moreover, some translations of examples need
improvement. For instance, Hes got an anonymous face. is translated as
, which is not idiomatic Chinese and could be improved as
. The translation for worry about the way of transporting ones huge
collection of books,
, is awkward
and would be better rendered as
.
In addition to problems in coverage and translation, there are also other
inconsistencies. The NECD4 offers two sorts of examples: phrasal examples
(which are dominant in the dictionary) and sentence examples. Yet these two
types are arranged randomly, i.e. in some entries, phrasal examples are placed
before sentence examples (or vice versa), while in others, they are simply mixed
up. For abbreviation headwords, some are given Chinese equivalents immediately after their full forms while others are not. Users then have to further refer
to the entries where the full forms are listed as headwords. This is not
user-friendly. In addition, some headwords are treated unequally. For example,
transformational (generative) grammar is provided with detailed explanation
,
[Noam Chomsky]
,
TG , whereas systemic grammar is
simply rendered as
systemic linguistics .
The previous edition of the NECD offered twelve appendices, six of
which have been removed in the fourth edition, including a Collection of
English Idioms with Chinese Translation. In fact, this former appendix would
remain useful for users to look up (or browse) and understand the cultural
differences between English and Chinese. Given the importance of idioms in
language learning and translation, it would have been better to retain this
appendix.
Because the compilation of the NECD is not supported by modern corpus
technology, some of the above-mentioned deficiencies and defects are inevitable. To improve the quality of future editions of the dictionary, NECD compilers should learn from the ECD2 and establish compiler-user correspondence
through a discussion forum on the website so as to solicit opinions and pool the
wisdom of actual users.
Generally speaking, the NECD4 is a successful bilingual dictionary which
presents a panorama of contemporary English lexicon. As designated in its
slogan, the NECD4 is indeed a Dictionary Made for China, offering a valuable learning and reference tool, and is a showcase for Chinese scholarship in
bilingual lexicography. Ever since its first publication in the 1970s, the NECD
has played an important part in the dictionary market in China, which is
currently being flooded with dictionaries imported from abroad or produced
through collaboration with foreign publishing houses. Current major
English-Chinese dictionaries, whether traditional brands such as the NECD

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or the ECD, or modern ones assisted by corpus technology such as the New
Age English-Chinese Dictionary (hh
ii) illustrate how Chinese
bilingual lexicography is thriving while maintaining a unique domestic character. Admittedly, in many ways the Chinese product still lags behind Western
dictionary compilation. For example, corpus technology is still rarely used.
Yet, there is reason to believe that through the joint efforts of experts carrying
on the traditions of Chinese lexicography and those now adopting linguistic
theories and technological innovations, Chinese bilingual lexicography will
continue to find its voice in the ring of international lexicography.
References
A. Dictionaries
Lu, Gusun (ed.) 2007. The English-Chinese Dictionary. (Second Edition.) Shanghai:
Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Zhang, Boran (ed.) 2004. New Age English-Chinese Dictionary. Beijing: the
Commercial Press.

B. Other literature
Chen, Wei 2006. Academic Reflection and Strategy Reconstruction. Shanghai: Shanghai
Translation Publishing House.
Hartmann, R.R.K. and James, G. 2000. Dictionary of Lexicography. Beijing: Foreign
Language Teaching and Research Press.
Li, Ming and Zhou, Jinghua 2000. An Introduction to Bilingual Lexicography. Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Wan, Jiangbo 2006. A Study on Bilingual Dictionaries and Translation. Shanghai: Fudan
University Press.
Yuzhen Chen
College of Foreign Languages and Cultures
Xiamen University, PRC
Department of Foreign Languages
Putian University, PRC
spring1918@yahoo.com.cn
doi:10.1093/ijl/ecp033
Advance access publication 12 December 2009

Dickson, Paul. Drunk: The Definitive Drinkers Dictionary. Brooklyn, NY: Melvillehouse.
2009. pp. 207. ISBN 978 -1-933633-75- 6. Price: $20.00.
Language is a reflection of the human mind. By looking at the lexical areas in
which a given language has grown more throughout history, one can gain
insight not only into the chief interests and concerns of its speakers, but also
into the secret corners of their minds. What is then to be made of the fact that
International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 23 No. 2.
# 2009 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org