The Future of Dictionaries

By Morry Schreiber, Chairman of the Board
Schreiber Translations, Inc.

A translator cannot operate without dictionaries. Anyone who has been translating for any length of time knows that not only does one need a dictionary to translate properly, one in fact needs a whole collection of dictionaries to even begin to cover all the linguistic and technical intricacies involved in a text to be translated.

The problem is that even with a whole array of dictionaries one still runs into words which the dictionary fails to list and define, or, in many cases, words which are defined but not for the particular usage one is looking for.

Now, some of the reasons for this are the fault of the dictionary itself. But some stem from the nature of language, a problem which we may never be able to fully overcome.

Let us first look at the nature of language. Contrary to popular belief, language is not a well-defined set of symbols which convey clear and precise meanings. Words are by nature imprecise, and particularly today, as some basic, everyday words take on entirely new meanings, one can no longer take any word for granted. Examples? The noun "web," which in the past referred mainly to a spider's spinning, today tends to elicit the image of the World Wide Web, which more and more people are exposed to with each passing day than once were exposed to a spider's web. The verb "to fax," which did not exist a few years ago, is now one of the most commonly used words in everyday commerce. The adjective "friendly," which only a decade ago referred mainly to people, as well as to an animal known as "man's best friend," is nowadays often used in regard to computer software, as in "user friendly." One could go on and on.

Another major linguistic phenomenon typical of the start of the twenty-first century is the symbiotic relationship among languages around the world. Languages have always influenced one another. Words have traveled around the globe, and the vocabularies of every language are enriched by words from other languages, which may have first originated in a place no one is aware of any longer. But today the rate of cross-fertilization among languages has greatly accelerated. Our unprecedented means of communication allow us to interact with cultures all over the globe by sitting at our table and surfing the Internet, or by lounging in front of our television screen. Almost unconsciously, we absorb new words from other languages all the time, and before we know it, they become part of our own language.

This is particularly true of the influence of the English language, mainly American English, on other languages around the world, particularly those of the industrialized countries, and those in the process of becoming industrialized. In Japanese, for example, computer terminology by and large is English in Japanese characters. But not only Japanese. A computer manual my company once translated from Slovak into English consisted of over 90 percent English words, with only 10 percent actual Slovak words. We are all familiar with such expressions as Spanglish, indicating the incursion of English into Spanish, or franglais, the spoken French which is replete with English words. This indeed has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Lexicography does not seem to be able to keep up with this cross-fertilization. When does a foreign word used in one's language become a legitimate part of that language? Do we need to wait one year, ten years, or fifty, to accept a foreign word in our language? After all, words may come and go, rather than take permanent root in their host language. Some years ago the Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid banished the word "football" from the pantheon of pure Spanish, and substituted the word "balonpié." Now, the Hispanic world, whose passion for this game surpasses the passion of the Spaniards for bullfighting, completely ignored this edict, and continued to call the game "futbol." Languages, after all, are not created, much less legitimized, by language academies, but by common usage in everyday life.

The problems of language are further exacerbated in a country as large and multicultural as the United States. One person currently running for national public office in the U.S. is campaigning on a platform of making English the official language. Yet, a few years ago the public schools in California faced the issue of making the speech of African Americans, called "Ebonics," part of the public school curriculum. But this is only the beginning. In the past 40 years, the demographics of the U.S. have changed to such an extent, that the public school system in my county–Montgomery county, Maryland, has recently contracted with AT&T's Language Line to provide interpreting in all languages to parents in the system who do not speak English fluently. One does not need a vivid imagination to realize that the unprecedented ethnic variety of the U.S. population inevitably leads to a linguistic metamorphosis unlike anything this country has ever seen.

One may argue that the U.S. has always been a nation of immigrants. This indeed is true, and it accounts for the linguistic riches and resilience of American English, which has absorbed thousands of words from its various immigrant populations. But there are some basic differences between the linguistic situation today and in the past. First, language today travels much faster than ever before, and new words and expressions can materialize before most people even notice them. Second, in the past immigrants arriving in America strove to become part of the English-speaking American scene and blend in the general culture. Today people have greater awareness of their own native culture, and are not as eager to turn their backs on it. If anything, those who have lived in the U.S. for several generations, such as African Americans, are looking for their cultural and linguistic roots. In addition, Some parts of the country now have Spanish-speaking populations that either outnumber the local English-speakers, or constitute a very large portion of the local community. Perfect examples are the American Southwest and southern Florida. The Spanish-speakers who live there are not geographically far removed from the Spanish-speaking Latin American continent, and continue to maintain strong cultural ties with the "old country." As a result, we now have a vigorous industry of books and music in Spanish, and Latin vocalists have moved into the center-stage of American popular music. The linguistic impact of this cultural change is only beginning to make itself felt.

The above-described linguistic transformation is taking place not only in the U.S., but in many other countries as well. Indeed, it has become a worldwide phenomenon. In countries like Spain and France, local languages that have been suppressed for many years, are coming to the fore. In the former Soviet Union, over two hundred languages which have been superceded by the Russian language, are emerging as the official languages of the new republics. The impact of such unprecedented linguistic change, coupled with the electronic revolution, will force lexicography to face problems unlike anything in the past.

This brings us back to the question of the future of dictionaries. Most people, when facing this question, think of the change from print dictionaries to electronic ones. But this is not the greater issue, rather part of it. The greater issue of the quality and effectiveness of dictionaries has been with us since the beginning of time, and has never been given a truly satisfactory answer. The most glaring example is the fact that the United States, the most advanced, wealthy and powerful country in the world, has never had what one might call the "Great Dictionary of the American Language," not even one remotely resembling the Oxford English Dictionary. A country that has spent billions of dollars on space research, medical research, and many other forms of human knowledge, has never bothered to assemble and publish what might be in effect the official source of its spoken and written language. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, not a single lexicographer emerged in the U.S. to rival Noah Webster, the last great American lexicographer, who died before the American Civil War, and whose name is still used to this day to identify what by default is the extant major American English dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary. If Webster was the Samuel Johnson of the U.S., who is the equivalent of James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary? The answer is nobody. Of all the shocking facts about the society that has put a man on the moon and become the world's only superpower, this is, in my humble opinion, one of the most shocking. To me it simply signifies a lack of respect for one's own language and culture.

But for us, translators, there are other issues of lexicography that are even more serious. The reason for this is that we are dependent not so much on general dictionaries, used by the rest of the world, but more so on technical dictionaries. From the day I began to translate for a living, some 21 years ago, I immediately became aware of the problem of technical dictionaries. I started a search for such dictionaries that has continued to this day. Any professional translator can attest to this experience. Every time we face a new assignment in a narrowly-defined technical subject, the question comes up again. While it is true that in the major languages, such as German, Russian, or Spanish, the problem is not nearly as acute as it is in the smaller languages, such as Turkish, Hebrew, or Indonesian, when it comes to the so-called exotic language, such as Haitian Creole, Amharic, or Kurdish, the problem is indeed monumental. In Spanish, Russian, or German, one may find a specialized dictionary for a subject like mining or metallurgy. In the second group, unlikely. In the third, impossible. But even in the major languages, technical dictionaries are limited in their scope and become quickly outdated. Few seem to come close to truly covering their subject. One could count those few on one's own fingers, for all the languages combined.

In spite of all the foregoing, as one continues to work with language, particularly in the translation field, one realizes that dictionaries, inadequate as they are, are not going away anytime soon. They are the tools we have, and while they do not provide all the answers, they certainly provide many. To quote Samuel Johnson's comment about his own dictionary, the first systematic dictionary of the English language: "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed." This is a lesson my publishing company learned last year when we issued the Multicultural Spanish Dictionary. We knew from the beginning that such a dictionary is bound to be somewhat controversial, since it covers some uncertain ground, namely, the various dominant usages of everyday Spanish words throughout the Spanish-speaking world. While the dictionary is the product of a group of native speakers of Spanish, all of them professional English-Spanish translators, representing nearly all the Spanish-speaking countries, it still raises questions as to whether one given term indeed is the one most representative of that particular word in that particular country. I recall in the winter of 2000 I took a short vacation in Puerto Rico. When the airport van turned off the highway to the sideroad leading to my hotel, I saw two small shopping strips on either side of the highway. I managed to detect four different words signifying "food store" within that small area of less than an acre: colmado, supermercado, supermarket, and minimercado. Now which one is most prevalent on the island of Puerto Rico? Furthermore, is the prevalent word the same as the one they used ten years ago? Does anyone have the definitive answer to this question? My two Puerto Rican translators who participated in the Multicultural Spanish Dictionary chose the word colmado. Others, like the Mexicans and the ones from Spain opted for supermercado. Clearly, none of those is cast in stone. And yet, thousands of people who have purchased this new dictionary since it was issued in August 1999 have found it quite useful.

Our latest venture into lexicography is a French-English Dictionary of Medicine. This major one-volume reference book of over 1300 pages is the result of 22 years of painstaking research and editing by a French-English medical translator at the U.S. Social Security Administration in Baltimore, an ATA member named Paul Djordjevic. With over 104,000 terms, it has more than triple the number of terms in the leading dictionaries in this area. To quote the author: "What prompted me to embark on this long and arduous project, which took me practically two decades to complete, was the frustration I experienced as a French medical translator. I found it incredible that there were no adequate single-volume French-English medical dictionaries, general in nature, that I as a translator found even remotely satisfactory. I translate medical evidence daily, and in the course of my work I would come across various terms which the existing dictionaries fail to help me with. . . Intimately familiar with the published French-English reference work that is in the market, I am firmly convinced that there is absolutely nothing out there in print that can even remotely compete with this project."

This new dictionary is an example of what one would consider to be the better dictionaries available on specific technical subjects, such as medicine. It represents the experience of someone who on a daily basis worked with English and French medical documents, and collected not only all of the medical terms available in the existing dictionaries during the past 20 or 30 years, but also thousands of additional terms, many of them more recent in origin, which makes the new dictionary a much more useful tool than anything currently available on the subject.

The new dictionary will also follow the new phenomenon of what well may become the wave of the future, namely, open-ended, updatable dictionaries either on CD-ROM or as an Internet service. While it will first come out in book form, it is also being prepared as an online dictionary, which will enable the publisher to provide frequent updates.

Looking far into the future, one can envision a time when an international body will be formed to coordinate the lexicography of the world. The United Nations may be the right host for such a body. Language in general should become more and more globalized as time goes by, and by coordinating the international lexicography, solutions may be found to problems which have always seemed to be beyond solution. One is reminded of the attempts of about a hundred years ago to form an international language, the most notable example being Esperanto. While one language may not be able to replace all the others, not even English, a great deal of terminology, mostly technical, may indeed become global, and serve as a bridge that unites people across all linguistic and cultures divides.