When I lived in Germany in 1989 (yeah, I'm that old, shut it), I was learning several languages at the same time. My school required me to take two foreign language classes. Since I already spoke English, I couldn't choose English. So, I was learning French and Russian in German. I didn't do all that well. I rememeber very vividly having 5 dcitionaries on my desk in my room and poring over them every night trying to figure out what was being said in German and then looking it up in my German-French dictionary or Russian-German dictionary or my German-Latin or German-Greek dictionary (I was studying philosophy at the time).
One evening for dinner, we had something I'd never seen or eaten before. It was a sort of stew of which the primary ingredient was aubergine. Don't ruin the story for anyone else if you already know what an aubergine is. I didn't and, when I wanted to find out what it was, I discovered a problem with most dictionaries. A problem I recently encountered again.
I went to look up aubergine in my English-German dictionary. It wasn't in there. That's odd. So, I went to my French-German dictionary. But, aubergine is a French word. So, I got a handy little entry that said, 'Aubergine - n. f. l'aubergine'. Big help. Could Russian help me? Nope, aubergine was aubergine. I asked people in Germany, I asked people in the States, I asked other UK students in class, I asked anyone I could think of and literally no one I knew had any idea what aubergine was in English (if they knew what an aubergine was at all) or they just knew it as aubergine. I remarked to my friend, Frank, at the time that perhaps we just didn't have aubergines in America. To which, he replied, 'You don't have the moon in the States but it's in the dictionary.' Arguably wrong, but his point was well taken. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. An aubergine is an eggplant. An eggplant. Common enough that it should have been well translated. We'll leave for another time a discussion about my ignorance of an eggplant.
Dictionaries are way too generic in some cases to be helpful and it's frustrating for me as an American to know that most language dictionaries cater to the UK than the States because we just aren't a polyglot or polyglot-interested country (present company excepted). The statistics for foreign language usage by native English speakers in America are scary and abysmal. It would be nice to have dictionaries that focus on American English. But, it's a question of audience and ultimately, I can't blame the publishers for making a dictionary that appeals to their audience.
That brings me to my dissappointment this week. I recently purchased the Hippocrene Compact Dictionary for Arabic. I was happy to find a very small tome that could fit in the side pocket of my backpack. Imagine my frustration when I found that some very basic things were missing from it. Months, days of the week, verbs like think and a list of other things were missing from it. But inexplicably it had words like kleptomania, lunar and optician. The one positive thing I can say about the dictionary is that it has a really good and straightforward verb conjugation appendix that shows how to conjugate the four types of Arabic verbs. But that's not worth the $9 I paid for it.
If I had the authors in front of me right now, I'd tell them the story I just told you and then finish with chiding them to think about who will use a pocket reference. It's not someone who knows the language well. Write for the audience. It will make your works much more enjoyable by your readers and bring them back over and over again, even if what you write is just a dictionary.
1 comment:
Unfortunately I have to disagree with you! So many things in this world are already catered to Americans; and I'm sure you will get a vast amount of foreign language dictionaries specifically for American English. But in Europe, UK English is the norm and it's not practical for dictionary makers to market it elsewhere; everyone learns the Queen's English as a foreign language in nearly all schools across the continent and consistency demands that it continues that way in professional circles. On the other hand, native English speakers are expected to be familiar with international terms. In Ireland for example, we have BBC, Australian soap operas, South African documentaries, plenty of American/Canadian films (or "movies" if you prefer ;) and of course lots of our own products. And that's just TV. So when I see the word "eggplant" or "color" or hear different word stress and pronunciation than I personally would use, I still know what the word is. Learning English for native speakers here involves being fluent in your dialect of English and proficient in most other dialects around the world whenever possible. On the other hand, when I visited the states nobody had ever heard a lot of words and expressions I used and I almost got fired for innocently suggesting that my teenage students share a "rubber" (i.e. "eraser"). And I'm shocked to see the amount of subtitles used in American TV shows when there is an interview in English with a non-American (Indian for example). That's impossible to imagine here.
I know you don't want to hear this, but the solution to the problem involves knowing ENGLISH well, and that includes British (or as I prefer to call it, "European") English. I'm quite proficient in Castilian Spanish for example, but am putting a lot of work into learning Argentinian Spanish differences before I move there and not forcing them to hear unfamiliar or possibly impolite European words (coger for example means to take in Spain [bus, train, book etc.], but is a vulgar term for having sex with in Latin America. I can't really say I speak Spanish unless I know these intricacies). A language is not limited to one of its dialects and that includes the one you are starting off with ;)
Having said that, due to globalisation (ahem... "globalization") most good dictionaries will list the American term anyway so you would not run into the eggplant issue if you had any decent dictionary nowadays. (I just checked and "eggplant" is in all of my POCKET foreign dictionaries, with "US" beside it for clarification).
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