Evaluating popular online English-Chinese dictionaries in China by applying Lew and Szarowska’s (2017) evaluation framework

• Published in: International Journal of Lexicography 2021-07, Vol.34 (2), p.157-182
• Main Authors: Liu, Dilin, Deng, Yaochen, Yang, Shiyan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0950-3846; 1477-4577
• DOI: 10.1093/ijl/ecaa026

By applying Lew and Szarowska’s (2017) evaluation framework and methodology (with a few methodological enhancements made), this study evaluated six popular online English-Chinese dictionaries in China and produced some useful findings. First, Lew and Szarowska’s framework and methodology proved very successful in this study, demonstrating their viability in evaluating online bilingual dictionaries, although a few aspects where enhancements could be made were also identified. Second, the results of the evaluation of the six dictionaries in comparison with those from Lew and Szarowska (2017) suggest that while online dictionaries in the past few years seemed to have made improvements in some areas (e.g. increased coverage of lexical items including neologisms, technical words, and multiword expressions), they appeared to have shown little improvement with problems in some other areas (e.g. inadequate provision of usage, English variety, and part of speech labels and some inappropriate example sentences). Suggestions for addressing the existing problems are provided and implications for future research are discussed.