Regional Labels in Some British and American Dictionaries

Norri, Juhani

doi:10.1093/ijl/9.1.1

Cited by 7 publications

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“…TTR a 20 ans / TTR Turns 20 "...waterlogged somewhere in mid-Atlantic" Section 3) looks at treatment in the above mentioned reference works (except the Longman dictionary), where considerable differences in labelling are especially to be noted in the Collins and Webster's dictionaries (the former preferring "informal" to "colloquial", for example)-a phenomenon often referred to in studies of Anglo-American lexicography (Norri, 1996;Tottie, 2002, pp. 95-97).…”

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“...waterlogged somewhere in mid-Atlantic.” Why American Readers Need Intralingual Translation but don’t often Get it1

Denton

2008

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The quotation in the title is a comment on presumed American reception difficulties of British author Sue Townsend’s bestseller The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1982). A number of American reviews of the book and a questionnaire I used with American readers amply demonstrated a (partial) breakdown in transatlantic communication. Does this mean that American readers of British texts where informal register and cultural embeddedness predominate need some form of intralingual translation? As ‘speakers of the same language’ (albeit a pluricentric one) they do not often get it, in consideration of the widely held belief in a common language and culture. Thus, when shared British text producer-receptor pre-established knowledge schemata can no longer be consistently activated, Americans may well be at a disadvantage as compared with readers of interlingual translations.La citation contenue dans le titre de cet article illustre les difficultés de réception aux États-Unis du best-seller The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1982), de l’auteure britannique Sue Townsend. Certains comptes rendus de l’ouvrage, ainsi qu’un questionnaire que j’ai utilisé auprès des lecteurs américains, démontrent clairement la rupture (partielle) de la communication transatlantique. Est-ce à dire que les lecteurs américains de textes britanniques, au sein desquels le registre informel et les traces d’un enracinement culturel sont omniprésents, ont besoin d’une certaine forme de traduction intralinguale? En tant que « locuteurs d’une même langue » (bien qu’il s’agisse d’une langue pluricentrique), ils n’en bénéficient pas souvent, compte tenu de la croyance répandue en une langue unifiée et une culture commune. Ainsi, lorsque les lecteurs américains ne partagent pas les mêmes schémas pré-établis de connaissances que les producteurs et les récepteurs de textes britanniques, ils peuvent se trouver désavantagés par rapport aux lecteurs de traductions interlinguales

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“...waterlogged somewhere in mid-Atlantic.” Why American Readers Need Intralingual Translation but don’t often Get it1

Denton

2008

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A History of the ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’. By Małgorzata Anna Kamińska

Brewer¹

2015

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In 1986, the Oxford lexicographer Robert E. Allen published a fascinating article entitled "A Concise History of the COD [Concise English Dictionary]". In it he described how he was now editing the 8th edition of this venerable work (first published in 1901), and gave a brief but illuminating sketch of its history and of the character and content of its seven previous editions. To do so Allen drew on his insider knowledge of Oxford University Press (OUP), including letters and memos exchanged between editors and publishers from the early days of the dictionary, and his own experience in exploiting the contents of the COD to re-edit the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Allen began by putting the COD in its commercial and institutional context. It was the first English dictionary to be published by OUP other than the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED) itself, which was then in the process of appearing in gradual instalments and was as yet incomplete. Rival publishing houses were already producing smaller, cheaper and more accessible dictionaries, cannibalizing the rich material available in the OED, and OUP needed to burn off these competitors and capitalize on its own major investment in English lexicography, which dated back to 1879 when the Press had first committed to funding the OED project. Allen explained the dependence of the COD on the parent dictionary and outlined the distinctive characteristics of the new work. Chief among these was the commitment of the two editors, the brothers Henry W. Fowler (1858-1933) and Francis G. Fowler (1871-1918, to multiple illustrative examples, in recognition that contextual evidence of usage is a primary tool in working out what and how a word means. Such illustrative examples were of course a key feature of OED itself, whose evidential basis was its collection of over five million quotations -although unlike OED's, the COD's quotations were mostly invented by the editors. To save the space thus occupied, the Fowlers employed a drastically elliptic form of expression in their defining and other editorial language which they referred to as 'telegraphese' (a term omitted from the dictionary itself -though later included in the first set of addenda). They also crammed lemmas into nested entries and did their best to embed grammatical information in the definitions.

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Theoretical Considerations for the Improvement of Usage Labelling in Dictionaries: A Combined Formal-Functional Approach

Ptaszynski¹

2010

International Journal of Lexicography

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Regional Labels in Some British and American Dictionaries

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

“...waterlogged somewhere in mid-Atlantic.” Why American Readers Need Intralingual Translation but don’t often Get it1

“...waterlogged somewhere in mid-Atlantic.” Why American Readers Need Intralingual Translation but don’t often Get it1

A History of the ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’. By Małgorzata Anna Kamińska

Theoretical Considerations for the Improvement of Usage Labelling in Dictionaries: A Combined Formal-Functional Approach

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