Fact and Fiction of the Bilingual Dictionary

Side by side with this expert opinion there has come down as common exper­ ience of everyone learning a foreign language, trying to communicate in il or trans­ lating from and into it, that foreign words do not only sound different but are nothing but approximations of what we think and feel by means of our own native words. In the glaring light of such a state of affairs, equally striking the philologist as well as the common learner, should the author of a bilingual dictionary ask h.mself seriously whether he has embarked on a Quixotic enterprise. After twenty years of enduring the labours and —to a minor degree— enjoying the satisfactions of comPiling a new English-German dictionary of about 120,000 entries I feel a need now to &ive vcnt to what I would like to call the lexicographer's dilemma. It consists simply in his brave attempt to do the impossible. And this is precisely my theme today; how 1 0 justify the compromise between insupportable claims and legitimate aims, be­ tween the fictions of the bilingual dictionary, what it erroneously sets out to be, and lhe facts that cut it down to its down-to-earth status. To be even more explicit: the fic­ titious claims are the lexical equivalences. The factual aims are the alphabetical en­ tries enabling the user to build hypotheses about the relations between words •n two languages. These relations are a fact, the equations are a fiction. In other words, I would like to focus on what a bilingual dictionary can seriously be expected to achieve, and, on the other hand, what it should not be inadvertently consulted about. To re­ fer to our quotations at the beginning, the dictionary should not purport to be an easy source of word-matches to be exploited by the unwary user filling word-gaps like in a