Approaches to Lexicography in English and Arabic

Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 2016

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2020

This article discusses the contribution of the Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ dictionary written by Buṭrus al-Bustānī, one of the leading figures of the Nahḍa, to the development of modern Arabic lexicography. This lexical endeavor is examined not only as part of a proto-national project, but as a pivotal moment in the development of modern Arabic lexical thought and in particular in al-Bustānī’s vision. Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ constituted an important pedagogical step in transforming classical Arabic into “a living” language adapted to the needs of the Arab nation. However, although Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ took the first crucial steps toward creating a modern Arabic lexical source, this dictionary mainly extends the age-old Arabic tradition of lexicography. It nevertheless paved the way to al-Bustānī’s final work, the encyclopedia Dāʾirat al-maʿārif, his most monumental effort and the cornerstone of al-Bustānī’s modern lexical vision.

In this presentation, we will illustrate the process of making our brand-new Arabic-English/English-Arabic dictionary, which is due for publication in print and online in August 2014. It is intended for speakers of both English and Arabic. It contains over 26,000 entries on each side, including many up-to-the-minute words and expressions. Collocations and examples are an important feature. The dictionary has been compiled using dictionary writing software that enables editors to work and communicate with one another regardless of their location. We show the entire process of making an Arabic dictionary, from finding a reliable framework in both languages, to developing a unique online functionality. We show the difficulties lexicographers face when compiling an Arabic dictionary, and the ways in which we dealt with those. In addition, the Oxford Arabic Dictionary has quite a few features that are entirely new to Arabic dictionaries, and we illustrate how we went about developing those.

Arabic language is the means whereby Arabs who inhabited the area extended from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean can communicate and, as such, is a strong factor in the Arab nation unity. Due to the fact that new terms are being created almost every day, it was natural therefore that Arab grammarians advocate that word-formation should, as far as possible, be carried out using the native lexical resources of the language. In addition, loan translations and direct borrowings from other languages should come to an end. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the applicability of the main methods put forward by early Arab grammarians to create and introduce new Arabic terms in order to cope with the flow of modern terminologies. This paper is based on a comparison between these methods to look into their workability and suitability in handling the problem of finding Arabic equivalents of foreign terms.

ACL 39th Annual Meeting, 2001

Traditional Arabic dictionaries are based on historical perspectives. They tend to include old meanings of little or no use to the language learner and lack modern typical usages. New dictionaries are needed that are based on an empirical approach where contextual analyses of language corpora determine typical central meaning. It is now possible to gather and access large quantities of electronic text and carry out fine analyses of linguistic data. Research has shown that linguistic analyses based on large corpora is of paramount importance to lexicographers, language teachers , machine translation and other NLP applications. Similarly, corpus-driven approaches are changing the way we understand the interaction between meaning and syntactic structure. These and other claims are discussed in this paper in the light of evidence from a limited corpus of Modern Standard Arabic.

Undoubtedly, collocation has become one of the most controversial linguistic terms of today. As an evidence to this, linguists did not agree up till today as to its exact definition, nor types, nor patterns. This may explain, to some extent, the scarcity of collocational dictionaries and their late appearance regardless of the huge number of collocations that can be found in general (i.e. non-collocational) lexicons and dictionaries of nearly all languages. Added to this is the difficulty of compiling a collocational dictionary unless modern technological tools such as computers, huge corpora, and text analysis software are used. This is true as the first English collocational dictionary appeared in 1986, the BBI, while in Arabic, the first one to appear was Hafiz in 2004 which is the main focus of this paper. This is exactly the reason behind the researcher’s interest in this dictionary as it is already the first of its kind in Arabic as is mentioned by its author on its front cover. Collocational dictionaries are indispensable tools for the translator, writer and learner of any foreign language. One of the reasons behind the errors translators make in rendering collocations from one language to another is that they consult general-purpose bilingual dictionaries that do not provide the translators with detailed explanation or examples of collocations. Hence, the significance of this paper as it represents an attempt towards introducing a modern-technology-based linguistic methodological and academic criticism for evaluating such a great effort aiming at elevating it to the best shape it can be and to help it become a model to be emulated in the field of compiling specialized as well as non-specialized Arabic\English and English\Arabic dictionaries. As the dictionary’s author has committed – according to the researcher – a number of methodological, editorial and translational mistakes; a matter which makes it incumbent upon specialists to look into its content to clarify such mistakes and attempt to amend them whenever possible.

World journal of English language, 2024

This research investigates the lexicographic strategies employed by Saudi English language scholars, focusing on their utilization of dictionaries. The study also assesses the effectiveness of bidirectional Arabic-English dictionaries, particularly for Saudi Arabian students learning English as a foreign language. This study utilized (SPSS versiоn 21.0) tо analyze data cоllected оn dictiоnary use strategies amоng Saudi students. The Likert scale was emplоyed tо encоde respоnses, and Crоnbach's cоefficient alpha analysis ensured internal cоnsistency. Results indicated that strategic dictiоnary use amоng Saudi students falls within the medium range, with a mean scоre оf 2.87. Nоtably, participants shоwed a higher inclinatiоn tоward emplоying lооk-up strategies (average = 3.69) and dictiоnary selectiоn strategies (average = 3.51), while repоrting less frequent utilizatiоn оf awareness strategies (average = 2.01) and lemmatizatiоn strategies (mean = 2.10). As far as the efficacy, usage, attitudes, and impacts of bi-directional online translation tools are concerned, participants unanimously rated these highly (average= 4.7) for saving time, in cases where the word(s) was unknown (average= 4.5), and in recording the new word in the mental lexicon (average= 4.2), but as confusing (average= 4.8) when used for complex word structure translation. In conclusion, Saudi Language and Translation program students demоnstrated mоderate scоres acrоss the fоur categоries оf dictiоnary use strategies, with a higher inclinatiоn tоward lооk-up and dictiоnary selectiоn strategies and lesser emphasis оn awareness and lemmatizatiоn strategies.

The ELRA Newsletter, Vol. 10, n°2, April-June 2005, 2005