Review Article: Oxford-Hachatte French Dictionary: French-English. English-French

• Published in: International journal of lexicography 1997-12, Vol.10 (4), p.311-329
• Main Author: Dubois Charlier, Francoise
• Format: Article
• Language: fre
• ISSN: 0950-3846

The Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary (Correard, Marie-Helere, & Grundy, Valerie [Eds], Oxford U Press, 1994) is reviewed from a lexicographic view emphasizing the problems resulting from editing bilingual dictionaries. The dictionary is corpus-based & claims to be "the most comprehensive, the most authoritative, the most up to date," a statement that is refuted. The introduction by B. T. S. Atkins addresses the topics related to a corpus-based dictionary: definition of a corpus, reasons a corpus is used, how the corpus was used, & the usefulness of this approach. Two stages of developing a corpus-based dictionary are cited: (1) without the aid of a contextual corpus, a monolingual framework definition is developed in the source language; & (2) source definition is provided to a translator/editor who then translates the definition using corpus data in order to match up the equivalent meanings in the other language. Criticism is presented for placement of entries, idioms, expressions, & compound nouns & for the usefulness of the insets that address word usage. It is noted that the dictionary does not resemble "dictionary French" & that English equivalents of French did not match the French equivalent of English for a given word. The number of notations used in each entry is excessive & includes field category, collocation indicators, semantic grouping, syntactic construction, grammatical data, level or register usage, & explanatory meanings. 5 Appendixes. M. Castillo