Equivalence and Lexical Anisomorphism in Bilingual Dictionaries

Abstract

The present paper addresses types of lexical anisomorphism and its treatment in bilingual dictionaries. The most difficult problem in coordinating the source language lexical units with those of the target language is linguistic anisomorphism. Full equivalence is a rare occurrence, found as a rule in terminologies. A vast majority of other cases includes lexical anisomorphism, which requires lexicographic treatment. One should differentiate between lexicological and lexicographic anisomorphism. The former type is much broader and it fully encompasses the latter type. Lexicological anisomorphism is found in the cases where equivalents exhibit differences of any kind. Lexicographic anisomorphism involves only those cases where the difference is relevant in lexicographic treatment. If we exclude rare cases of full equivalence, which do not constitute a problem in lexicographic treatment, the simplest way to classify lexical anisomorphism is to count the number of equivalents in the target language. If no equivalents exist, that is zero equivalence. The second type is multiple equivalence, where the target language has two or more equivalents. Finally, the third type is partial equivalence, where there is one equivalent in the target language, but there are some relevant differences between it and the source language headword. Multiple equivalence can include zero and partial equivalence. There are also cases of pure multiple equivalence. The following types of multiple equivalence based on partial equivalence can be differentiated: connotation, application, organization, syntagmatic, frequency, network, and image. There is a direct connection between the three main types of lexical equivalence and their lexicographic treatment. Zero equivalence should be explained, multiple equivalents should be separated, and with partial equivalents, one should alert the user to the difference. There is no such direct link between subtypes of multiple equivalence and their treatment. However, there are some tendencies: exemplification is common with operators, cotextualization is common in the treatment of application splits, and contextualization is common in the treatment of connotation splits.