Reflections on the Making of the Grand dictionnaire chinois–français contemporain

Abstract

This article discusses how the Grand dictionnaire chinois-français contemporain (GDCFC, 2014), one of the largest Chinese-French dictionaries, was designed and compiled. Due to the limited resources in the language pair of Chinese and French, GDCFC was designed as a bidirectional bilingual dictionary. To meet the needs of Chinese-speaking learners of French, the main user group, GDCFC extends the lemma list, and enriches the information of French equivalents in terms of their frequency, grammar and register. To be geared to the needs of French-speaking learners of Chinese, the secondary user group, GDCFC includes some headwords that fall into regional varieties of Chinese, and also provides useful information on the formulaicity and flexibility of Chinese characters (classifiers in particular). Some other features, such as the indication of POS and equivalents in context, and establishment of a semantic network of the nomenclature, were designed to benefit both groups of users. The making of this dictionary has implications for the compilation of other less-resourced bilingual dictionaries.