Article,
Which Microstructural Features of Bilingual Dictionaries Affect Users' Look-Up Performance?
International Journal of Lexicography, (2002)
Abstract
This study has been conducted with the aim of detecting possible links between the structural features of English-Arabic dictionaries and errors made by 46 English majors at Kuwait University when translating individual items they encountered in current English texts. Specially designed look-up records were used by the subjects for each problematic word. It was found that success rates decreased when long entries of polysemous words were consulted in the bilingual dictionary and the senses needed in the entries were located some distance away from the senses that these users actually extracted. Some of the students' erroneous translations were attributed to the problematic macro- and microstructural features of the English-Arabic dictionary: method of sense ordering, untranslated derivatives, column width, spacing between monosemous entries, typeface size, etc. The study also detected a part played by structural effects of the original English text, e.g. word division at line endings. The users were also responsible for some of these errors, e.g. by misreading the item in the text, especially in cases of English confusables.
