The past, present and future of dictionaries (preface to the third edition)

The third edition of Chinese-English dictionary started in 2000 and lasted for ten years. Now that editing and proofreading are drawing to a close, it is finally possible to write an editorial feeling without entries and proofs. But I have to put down this dictionary first, and ask readers to go further with me and have a look at the source of Chinese and foreign dictionary compilation history.

There is a Chinese and foreign dictionary in the world, which started 400 years ago. At the end of 16, Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci (1552- 16 10) and Nicolas Trigaud (1577- 1628) arrived in China one after another for the convenience of newcomers. This alphabetical Hanla dictionary was completed in 1598, and it is the first western Chinese and foreign dictionary known so far. Unfortunately, it has not been published, and its manuscript is still thought to be in the Jesuit archives in Rome. Later, there were manuscripts or manuscripts of Chinese-Italian, Chinese-Portuguese, Chinese-Western and French dictionaries, most of which were written by missionaries. In the two centuries of 17 and 18, Xi Shi compiled a large number of dictionaries, word manuals and phonetic symbols for learning Chinese, but only a few of them were lucky enough to be published as books. China scholars are probably most familiar with The Eyes and Ears of Western Confucianism (1626 published in Hangzhou). At first glance, this is also a list of words for western scholars to learn Chinese, but the Latin Pinyin method it uses is the first Chinese Pinyin system made public in the world, which can be called the arrow of modern Chinese Pinyin scheme. The early Chinese-foreign dictionaries not only made contributions to China's phonetic notation, but also made many useful attempts in the translation of Chinese and Western names, the explanation of concepts, the description of idioms and even the understanding of Chinese structural features.

The compilation of Chinese-English dictionaries started late, because the British and Americans came to China late. The compilation and publication of Chinese-English dictionaries seems to be more smooth because of the reference of predecessors' dictionaries and the participation of more China scholars. The first officially published Chinese-English dictionary was The Chinese Dictionary edited by Ma Lixun (1782- 1834), which was published in Macau in 18 19. Since then, by the middle of the 20th century, British and American scholars in China have compiled many Chinese-English dictionaries, such as the Dictionary of Chinese Syllables edited by Samuel Wells Williams (18 12- 1884). A Chinese-English dictionary edited by Zhai Lisi (1845- 1935) (1892); A Chinese-English dictionary compiled by Marco (1931-1918). These three Chinese-English dictionaries were all published in Shanghai, the largest port of Sino-Western trade.

The history of compiling and publishing Chinese-English dictionaries is in step with the process of China's opening to the outside world, and so is the 20th century. From 65438 to 0978, just after the Cultural Revolution, the first Chinese-English dictionary compiled by China people appeared in Chinese mainland, that is, the first edition of this dictionary, which was published by the Commercial Press. After 30 years of reform and opening up, this Chinese-English dictionary of Beijing Foreign Studies University has just gone through 30 years. This is not a coincidence. It is an echo of the publishing history of Chinese-English dictionaries and the social development history of China. Although it was published in 1978, the compilation of a Chinese-English dictionary began in the year of 197 1. It was a hard time, but the editors relied on the sense of responsibility and professionalism of scholars to overcome various restrictions such as social environment and data conditions and completed a huge project in time. This first step is extremely important in the history of Chinese-English dictionary compilation. In the future, no matter which Chinese-English dictionary is added, edited or edited, it will benefit from the first one in 1978 to some extent. Of course, an era will always have its own problems. After all, the 1978 version bears the traces of ten years of turmoil. After the reform and opening up, China's society has improved rapidly, and Chinese vocabulary has been updated rapidly, which will soon need to be reprinted. The Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (hereinafter referred to as FLTRP) published a revised Chinese-English Dictionary on 1995. At the same time, other Chinese-English dictionaries have come out one after another, such as The Chinese-English Dictionary (Shanghai Jiaotong University Press, 1993), The Chinese-English Dictionary by Germany (Chinese Dictionary Press, 1997) and The New Age Chinese-English Dictionary by Wu and Cheng Zhenqiu (Commercial Press, 2000). In these works, some parts of speech are beautifully marked and the system is outstanding, some win with rich technical terms, and some are widely praised for their many words and detailed examples. In today's Chinese-English dictionary field, it is true that various schools are competing for each other, and only in this way can the dictionary industry flourish and benefit both academia and the market.

Dictionaries are for people, so convenience and practicality should always be considered. However, dictionaries should sort out the lexical units of a language and summarize a clear system, so certain theories should run through it. As far as the interpretation of parts of speech is concerned, as early as in Wu Fu, the compilers tried to define the grammatical functions of some words, such as interpreting the word "ge" as "an auxiliary word preceding various nouns to express individuality". Later Chinese dictionaries and Chinese-English dictionaries marked "ge" as a quantifier, but changed the descriptive grammatical description into a clear part-of-speech marker, which was handled in different ways, and the understanding was essentially the same as that of Wu Fu. Another example is the word "men", which is defined as "an auxiliary word added to personal pronouns and appendages to form a plural number ...", which is completely in line with our labeling and explanation of "man" as a suffix representing plural numbers. Ma Lixun was able to form this definition because westerners had already learned Chinese grammar. Before writing the dictionary, he published a Chinese grammar book, Chinese Grammar (18 15). The achievements of grammar research, especially the understanding of parts of speech, will naturally be reflected in dictionary compilation. China people's own study of Chinese grammar, that is, Chinese grammar in the modern sense, began with Ma Shi Wen Tong written by Ma Jianzhong (1898). In the past hundred years, grammarians' understanding of the division of parts of speech has gradually been reflected in the compilation of Chinese dictionaries. The Applied Chinese Dictionary (Commercial Press, 2000), Modern Chinese Standard Dictionary (Chinese Publishing House/FLTRP, 2004) and Modern Chinese Dictionary, the fifth edition (Commercial Press, 2005) all provide part-of-speech tagging systematically. Chinese-English dictionaries are not backward. Wu Guanghua's Chinese-English Dictionary, De Ke Fan's Chinese-English Dictionary and Yu Hui's New Century Chinese-English Dictionary are all marked with parts of speech. There used to be a saying in Chinese that "words have no definite category". Is the Chinese word "Ding" or "Indefinite"? If there are classes, where are the boundaries and the standards of discrimination? These questions will still be debated in the field of grammar, but in the field of dictionaries, it seems that people are more willing to believe them. After all, Chinese parts of speech are not always in a mess, and there is no system and rules. Dictionaries tend to be practical, putting aside the differences between grammarians and seeking a roughly feasible part-of-speech framework.

Everyone is doing part-of-speech tagging, and this dictionary is just following the trend. But on the basis of what we have, we still want to try to go further and carry the mark to the end to form a word. In this regard, there have been some attempts in the past, including the last edition of this dictionary. It can be seen from a sentence in the Preface of the revised edition of 1995 that the editors of that year also thought about the parts of speech involved in single words: "The treatment of bound morphemes in single word entries is different from that of free morphemes." Specifically, all words that are meaningless in themselves and only used as word-formation components, such as "butterfly" of "butterfly" and "Buddha" of "as if", are all represented by "see below" or "see" (see also) in the interpretation. This revision does not need a roundabout explanation, but uses clear marks directly: "Butterfly" and "Buddha" are just nonsense syllables, not morphemes (= morphemes), so they are marked as sounds; Words that are meaningful but generally not used alone, but only used as word-formation components, such as "qi", are marked as morphemes. Some words were not used alone, but became words in ancient times, such as "viper" and "viper" (Shuo Wen Jie Zi: "viper, worm"; "Jade": "Snakes are also poisonous, and they sting and break their hands." ) is a monosyllabic word. When we encounter such words, we still regard them as independent words. For example, the word "Fu" is used as the name label, but the stylistic label "Gu" is added. Because Chinese has a long history, there are obvious differences between ancient and modern, and there are also considerable differences between written language and spoken language, so it is often necessary to consider part of speech and style together. In terms of stylistic and rhetorical labeling, this revision has also made some improvements, distinguishing classical Chinese, written language and spoken language. In addition, considering that the difference between different styles is not necessarily absolute, it is often just a matter of degree, we put "duo" and "chang" before the stylistic markers of some words, for example, we label "however" as "duo shu". There are several conjunctions that indicate the turning point of mood, and "however" is a more formal one; It is not unheard of in spoken English, but if a person always speaks "however, however" at ordinary times, it will appear bookish. Usually we say "but" or "but". As for "however", you can hardly hear it in spoken English, so there is no doubt about labeling it "book".

Part-of-speech tagging of nouns, verbs, forms and adverbs is set for Chinese vocabulary, but the division and layout of parts of speech between Chinese and English are different after all, so sometimes the parts of speech of words used in English interpretation are not consistent with those of Chinese vocabulary. Generally speaking, we will try our best to make the parts of speech of the source language and the target language consistent. First, it can reflect the uniqueness of English and Chinese. Second, it is more comfortable in language sense. Third, it can provide an extra expression. For example, it is certainly possible to translate "peacekeeping" into "peacekeeping" (such as "peacekeeping forces in the army", etc.). ), but since this is a verb, we might as well change the meaning of translation to "keep (the) peace" (for example, see the Oxford English Collocation Dictionary of FLTRP, 2006). Part-of-speech tagging refers to Modern Chinese Dictionary (2005) and will be supplemented or tagged if necessary. For example, "Refund" is marked as a verb in Modern Chinese Dictionary. The first edition of this dictionary (1978) only has the definition of a verb, but the revised edition (1995) has already regarded this word as a verb and noun: ① Refund; Get a refund ② Refund (or unused) ticket: etc ~ Find a refund (or unused) ticket. This revision does not need to change the original definition, but only adds part-of-speech markers. For words with common verbs and nouns such as "Refund" and "Refund", it is more reasonable to mark the part of speech separately. Let's give another example. The word "signature" is only marked as a verb in Modern Chinese Dictionary and Applied Chinese Dictionary, while the old dictionary has only one verb definition (signature; Personally), but in the following example, "signature" is obviously a noun: "10000 copies were collected for the petition ~ 10000 signatures were collected for the petition", so we might as well separate the name from the verb. Use cases are very important, Samuel, the father of English dictionaries? Samuel johnson (1709- 1784) put it well: "Words must be found in use" (… words must be found where they are used). The part of speech in Chinese is inherently lively. It is often good to say that a word is a noun, verb, adjective or something else. In order to illustrate the problem, it is best to match it with natural and appropriate examples.

This dictionary is a "medium-sized language reference book" (the preface was revised at 1995), and this new revision does not intend to change this position. This means that we should control the length and avoid being too big. Take the word "Shu" as an example. Since "letter from home" and "letter from private" are separate articles, such words are not repeated as examples, but reference symbols are used to indicate these common collocations. On the one hand, we should save space, on the other hand, we should ensure that the explanation is complete and the examples are sufficient. For single-word entries, try to find the usage of your own words when providing example sentences. Let's take Shu as an example. The examples cited in general dictionaries are nothing more than "home ~" and "private ~". However, why not take "entering a private school at the age of six ~ ~" as an example and list "home ~" and "private ~" as reference items. Some dictionaries are designed to make it convenient for people to use, so they don't have to spend time starting a new page, so examples like "home ~, private ~" are given under the word "school". This has its own advantages, and the related words can be seen immediately, but it also has disadvantages: if all the words are independent articles, for example, the repeated contents in a dictionary will inevitably increase and the head will naturally become bigger. The head of the department is big, which is much heavier in the hand, but it is also inconvenient. In addition, consumers have to pay more for more copies, which is another disadvantage. "There are advantages and disadvantages", the old saying is absolutely true. Different dictionaries have different ideas and compilation methods, which may be good in one respect, but insufficient in the other, so I'm afraid it's difficult to cover everything. So compilers don't have to belittle each other, and experts don't have to attack. It is because of your different editing methods that readers and users can have more choices and prosper the dictionary industry.

Since it is a Chinese dictionary, we should collect more common words in life and try not to miss them. The language life in contemporary China is extremely active, and the online vocabulary is particularly rich and productive, with endless creativity. People have different views on accepting or not accepting vulgar new words and new meanings, and which one to accept. Or think that the dictionary should be stable, and wait for a word to stabilize and become a member of the vocabulary before being included as a word. This opinion is of course reasonable, but sometimes it is not easy to judge whether a new word has stabilized and how long it can last. The author's point of view is that as long as it is a common new word and new meaning among hundreds of millions of people, even if it is just a passer-by in the history of Chinese development, it is possible to quit using it in a few years. Dictionaries have many functions, one of which is to record the unique vocabulary and usage of an era. Dictionaries not only serve the world, but are also compiled for future generations: let future generations find the unique words of this era in our dictionaries when reviewing the history of the early 2/kloc-0 century.

What will happen in the field of Chinese-English dictionaries in the next 20 years or 20 years? It can be predicted that Chinese-English dictionaries will play a more important role with the integration of China and the outside world and the gradual going abroad of China culture. This dictionary contains many words about China culture, which can be refined and expanded on the existing basis to write a dictionary with more China cultural characteristics. The China culture we are talking about is not only a traditional culture based on classics and archaeology, but also a new culture since the May 4th Movement and a contemporary culture since the reform and opening up. Not a single ethnic Chinese culture, but a multi-ethnic Chinese culture; It is not limited to the mainland culture, but covers the greater China culture of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. In addition, the number of overseas Chinese learners is also increasing. Considering this demand, we can also devote ourselves to writing a Chinese-English dictionary for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Let foreigners learn Chinese, which is the original intention of Xi Shi to compile a Chinese-English dictionary. Today, we should not neglect this purpose. An export-oriented Chinese-English dictionary may need to pay more attention to contemporary life vocabulary, fully analyze usage differences, provide more collocations and example sentences, and highlight the difficulties for foreigners to learn Chinese. Furthermore, Chinese-English dictionaries can be further specialized and serialized to meet the needs of readers and users in science and technology, commerce, politics and law, sports, tourism, leisure and other fields. In these aspects, the bilingual parallel corpus of FLTRP with a considerable scale should be able to show its talents.

The involvement of electronic media has greatly changed the working platform of dictionary compilation. In the past, people could only make cards and copy items by hand with pen and paper. Now people operate directly on the computer, and pen and paper have become an auxiliary tool. Some foreign publishing houses have developed software for editing dictionaries, relying on their own corpora to write articles, polish them, add or delete them, and finalize them online. These are nothing more than technical means. We can and should learn, and it's not too difficult to learn. What is really difficult is how to deal with the challenges of electronic dictionaries and online dictionaries. The only difference between electronic dictionaries and paper dictionaries lies in the material and appearance: the paper version is made into an electronic version, which is quick to find and portable, while the substantive content and compilation method have not changed. There are two kinds of online dictionaries: one is to establish an electronic dictionary on the Internet. Although the interface is broad, it seems to be a closed system, an extension of paper on the screen, which only facilitates the mutual reference of related items and provides more relevant information and rich site links; The other is different, taking the way of free participation and co-creation on the Internet (such as WIKI), changing the practice that a few lexicographers have been delineating entries and giving explanations for thousands of years. The latter type of online dictionary is a real revolution, liberating words from experts and giving them back to the people. It should be noted that words once existed in the mouths and written languages of hundreds of millions of people, and now they have returned to the people's dictionaries, which is the source and output of the return of words to nature. On the Internet, the space of dictionary compilation is open, the interface is free, the boundary between editor and reader is blurred, and the difference between subject and object is no longer important. If there is a line of online dictionaries, the task of practitioners is not to compile dictionaries themselves, but to coordinate and manage dictionaries. Facing the innovation of online dictionaries, paper dictionaries should also be changed. But how? At present, there seems to be no answer, which needs to be explored by academia and industry and gradually realized through practice.

In the process of compiling the third edition of this dictionary, colleagues from northern China and foreign scholars contributed the most. At the beginning of the project, I discussed the editing work with Mr. Wei Dongya, editor-in-chief of 1995 and Mr. Gao, deputy editor-in-chief, and invited Xu Shigu, editor-in-chief of Commercial Press, Pan, professor of Peking University, Wang Fengxin, researcher of Institute of Linguistics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Zhuang Yichuan, professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University, to discuss the editing essentials together. We listened to your suggestion. Chen Dezhang, Li Jing and Shen Yuping, professors of Beijing Foreign Studies University, Lynette Shi, senior interpreter of the United Nations, and Ms. Zhang Siying, editor-in-chief of FLTRP, participated in the phased revision; Graduate students from the School of Foreign Languages, Yu Heng, and comrades outside the school, Xu Hai, Wang and Zhou, respectively undertook the revision of entries, and Dr. Yin Hongbo assisted in reviewing the part-of-speech tagging. Professor Ma Aide from Foreign Affairs University and Australian sinologist also joined our small team. In the later period, more than ten editors of the Academic and Dictionary Branch of FLTRP invested heavily. In addition to normal editing and proofreading, they also made contributions in collecting new words and meanings, compiling appendices, drawing entries and pictures. Words are hard to express, and I know myself very well. I want to take the opportunity of the new edition to say thank you to all the cooperation and supporters! The publication date of dictionaries is also a time when editors are afraid. They are willing to listen to the opinions of all parties and hope that they can be repaired in the future.