Is a Hybrid Bilingual Dictionary a Tenable Proposition ?

Over the past three decades, great strides have been made in the field of pedagogical monolingual dictionaries in English. By comparison, the content, methodology and the primary functions of the bilingual dictionary (BD) have remained largely unaltered. Research and experience in the fields of translation and AFL/EFL within the Arabic context, however, indicate that the status quo of the Arabic-English dictionary is untenable as present dictionaries are evidently not only inadequate but are likely to lead to errors of usage. Therefore, it is felt that extensive modifications need to be made to the Arabic-English dictionary in order to make it more pedagogically oriented for foreign learners and more responsive to the actual needs of Arab translation professionals and language learners. The proposal will result in the production of a hybrid dictionary intended for decoding and encoding purposes. The methodology, content and functions, served by this hybrid dictionary as well as the vast potential offered by electronic lexicography mean that traditional dichotomies in dictionary typology thought to be mutually exclusive need to be reconsidered. Equally, more scholarly attention should be paid to this new kind of hybrid dictionary.


Introduction:
Over the past few decades, monolingual lexicography has undergone several drastic changes that resulted in the production of very advanced pedagogicallyoriented dictionaries.Briefly stated, the changes involved the incorporation of significant numbers of collocations and multiword units (MWU's) in response to Sinclair's "idiom principle"; the extensive use of corpus-driven data in definitions, usage and illustrations; the emergence of electronic and online dictionaries with all the potential they offer in terms of storage and data manipulation; the use of a controlled defining vocabulary; the overall simplification of the definitions themselves and the inclusion of pragmatic details (e.g.spoken versus written, standard versus non-standard, specialized, slang, taboo, etc) in the microstructure of the dictionary.This integration of pedagogy in the practice of lexicography increasingly reflected the conscious response of dictionary compilers to foreign language learners' expectations.The need to provide an extra language in the monolingual dictionary also gave rise to a new type of dictionary known as the "bilingualized dictionary" which is defined as "… a hybrid dictionary; (…) a monolingual dictionary in the target language (…) with definitions, paraphrases and examples; to these are added translation 'equivalents' in the source language" (Kirkness 2005. p. 75, quoted in Rasmussen, 2010).
A cursory glance at the Arabic-English-Arabic dictionaries (henceforth BD's), by comparison, will instantly reveal that neither English-Arabic dictionaries nor their Arabic-English counterparts have been impacted by the developments witnessed in monolingual lexicography.In fact, most of the dictionaries produced, in this part of the world, have either based themselves on English monolingual dictionaries (e.g.Al-Mawrid (2008) which was based on Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published in 1961 andAtlas (2002) which is a translation of the American Heritage Dictionary published in 1969) or were the outcome of personal efforts on the part of individuals (e.g.Rohi Baalbaki's Al-Mawrid: A Modern Arabic-English Dictionary (2002) and Hans Wehr' Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1961) (DMWA)).In this paper, we shall present the case for the BD, give an overview of the content of the BD in metalexicography, review the definition of equivalence in the theory of translation and how the notion differs in bilingual lexicography, list the reasons why the current Arabic-English dictionaries in the Arab World fail the user and present Al-Murshid, a new hybrid Arabic-English dictionary which aims to be pedagogically-oriented and cater for the needs of three groups of users: learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), learners of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) and translators.We shall conclude by arguing that bilingual lexicography merits more research and that the methodology and theoretical underpinnings of Al-Murshid could be built on as a basis for the development of better bilingual paper and online dictionaries in future.

The Case for the Bilingual Dictionary:
In principle, the question of whether the monolingual dictionary is indeed superior to the BD or whether the first type is used more frequently by language learners than the latter are two issues that remain controversial in the literature.The fundamental changes made to the English monolingual dictionary, to make it more pedagogically-oriented, have certainly revolutionized it.These changes have also been paralleled by a great deal of scholarly interest in the subject.Metalexicographic research conducted on the BD, on the other hand, represents only a small fraction of that devoted to monolingual lexicography.This disregard of the BD, coupled with the failure of bilingual lexicographers to initiate any significant changes in their work, has meant that the field of bilingual lexicography has remained largely impervious to change for decades.To some extent, this situation is partly responsible for the claim that the monolingual dictionary is the definitive source for language learners and even translators; the monolingual dictionary, concludes Kirkness (2005) "represents for teachers and learners alike perhaps the single most valuable source of linguistic information on all aspects of the target language" (p.78).(See also Scholfield).Warning users against relying on bilingual dictionaries, Atkins (1985) pontificates: "Monolinguals are good for you (like whole meal bread and green vegetables); bilinguals (like alcohol, sugar and fatty foods) are not, though you may like them better" (p.22).Bilingual dictionaries, moreover, are viewed as "counterproductive because they culturate the erroneous assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the words of the two languages" (Aust,Kelley & Roby,p. 66).Ducroquet (1994) even questions the most fundamental objective the BD purports to serve: "Very few translation problems can be solved with the help of those dictionaries.Worse still, the use of bilingual dictionaries can be positively damaging" (p.48).Other researchers, like Marcello (1998), are less dogmatic and do not seem to favor one type of dictionaries over the other; rather, they claim that the dictionary to be used depends on the language proficiency of the user.Stein (2002) supports this view: "The most natural progression seems to be from the bilingual to the monolingual English learners' dictionary to the monolingual general-purpose dictionary" (p,28).To some, both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries present the user with problems or are of limited use (Atkins, 1985;McCarthy, 1990;Laufer and Hadar, 1997).But this progression from the bilingual to the monolingual dictionary is questioned by Hartmann (1992) who states: "I could not find any evidence … that learners were prepared to be weaned away from the BD to the monolingual, even if the latter were readily available" (p, 64).But advocacy for the BD is not totally absent; there are researchers who are either in favor of the BD (Hayati, 2006) or have come to the conclusion that language learners do prefer or actually use the BD more often than its monolingual counterpart (Tomaszczyk 1986;Piotrowski 1989;Raudaskoski, 2002;Varantola, 2002) whether for translation or in foreign language learning.Piotrowski (1989), for example, comments: "no matter what their level of competence, foreign learners and users use their bilingual dictionaries as long as they use dictionaries at all" (p.73).
There is no denying that the monolingual dictionary offers distinct advantages to the user.Equally valid is the claim that bilingual dictionaries remain far behind in their theoretical underpinnings, methodology, technical specifications and content if compared to the latest versions of the major monolingual dictionaries.But when all is said and done, bilingual dictionaries remain an essential tool for the translator

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University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 and the language learner and they will continue to be around for as long as these two groups of dictionary users exist; the BD will always be consulted to look up the interlingual meaning(s) of a word, a collocation or a MWU in SL in order to understand it in reading or use it in writing or speaking, to find some stylistic, grammatical, phonological or pragmatic information about it, to see if a certain collocation is cited or is likely to occur, to confirm a hunch or an uncertainty, to find other possible translational equivalents or to see what information the BD can offer probably before the monolingual dictionary is consulted.And in tapping the resources of the BD, the user is trying to access, at least partially, the lexical competence of the TL native speaker (Varantola, 2002).

Content of the Bilingual Dictionary:
Most of the theoretical work done in the field of bilingual lexicography has been primarily in BD typology (or classifications) and the features that need to be present in the BD (Scherba, 1940;Haas, 1962;Malkiel, 1959;Quemada, 1968;Zgusta, 1971;Al-Kasimi, 1977;Huang Jianhua, 1987;Landau, 1989;Atkins, 1996;James, 1998 andKlapicová et al, 2004).An overview of Zgusta (1971), Landau (1989) and Haensch and Omeñaca (2004) shows that the three studies agree on the inclusion of the following features in the dictionary: a. the SL entry word in its canonical form; b. a translation of the L1 entry in L2; c. grammatical information (it is not clear if this information pertains to L1 or L2); d. pronunciation.Zgusta (1971) recommends the inclusion of encyclopedic information and etymology.Landau (1989) and Haas (1962), on the other hand, add information on usage as well as the inclusion of names and specialized terms.Haensch and Omeñaca (2004), in turn, suggest usage restrictions and illustrative examples.Compactness due to space restrictions in the paper dictionary is also considered by both Landau (1989) and Haas (1962) with the latter proposing one more feature; namely that the BD should be adapted for machine translation.A fairly detailed description of the content of the electronic bilingual dictionary entry is also given in Atkins (1996) where twenty major features are cited, along with the data type, mode, information content, function and user.This paper will show that these features are insufficient if a hybrid dictionary is to be produced; some of them need to be reconsidered while others need to be added.But before we address those features, let us turn our attention to the notion that lies at the very core of BD, namely the notion of translational (or interlingual) equivalence.

Interlingual Equivalence: Challenges:
" Equivalence," says Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation (2001), "is a central concept in translation theory, but it is also a controversial one" (p.96).Chesterman (1970) echoes the same thoughts when he describes equivalence as "the big bugbear of translation theory, more argued about than any other single idea" (p. 9 quoted in Emery, 2004).How controversial the issue is can be seen in the divergent views held by translation theorists.Vinay and Darbelnet, Catford, Nida, Juliane House, Wolfram Wilss and Koller represent at one extreme a group of theorists that considers equivalence essential in the theory of translation.At the other extreme, we encounter names such as Snell-Hornby (1988) and Vermeer in his Skopostheorie, with the first describing equivalence as ""unsuitable as a basic concept in translation theory" and "an illusion of symmetry between languages which hardly exists beyond the level of vague approximations and which distorts the basic problems of translation" (p.22).Snell-Hornby also advocates the view that equivalence is basically a dynamic notion, a point of view that seriously undermines the efforts of the bilingual lexicographer.A third group has chosen to chart a "a middle course"; it is eminently represented by Peter Newmark and Mona Baker who follow a bottom-up approach to text translation, with the word being the first level of analysis in translation.Yet, even Baker (1992) views the concept of equivalence as a term that is used "for the sake of convenience -because most translators are used to it rather than because it has any theoretical status" (pp.5-6).
From the bilingual lexicographer's standpoint, finding translational equivalents for lexical units in the SL is the quintessential issue.Zgusta (1971) sums up this task as follows: "(The) basic purpose (of the BD) is to coordinate with the lexical units of one language those lexical units of another language which are equivalent in their lexical meaning" (294).But equivalence at the text level -i.e.equivalence viewed from the perspective of translation as a process and/ or as a product -does not necessarily correspond with the translational equivalence sought and recorded in the BD (Podolej, 2009).Textual (or contextual) equivalence is a characteristic of the text as a communicative event and is, by necessity, context-sensitive,

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University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 dynamic and subject to stylistic, pragmatic, cultural and syntactic constraints.The method of translation (as defined by Newmark) also has an immediate bearing on the notion.Equivalence in the BD, on the other hand, holds between lexical units of varying lengths and is inevitably semantics-oriented, static and context-free.This being the case, translational equivalents found in the dictionary may undergo certain changes before they find any form of representation in the target text at the hands of the translator, if any at all.This distinction is crucial as it crystallizes the nature and limitations of equivalence in the BD and expresses the fact that, for the translator, bilingual equivalence in the dictionary serves as the starting point in the translation process and will contribute to the final product without necessarily being identical with it.
Translational equivalence, however, is not without its complications.For one thing, the lexicographer has to recognize and find solutions for the problem of anisomorphism or mismatch in the two lexical systems in question.There are thousands of cases where a given lexical item in the SL is not lexicalized in the TL, mostly due to social and cultural diversity (Cvilikaitë, 2007) , none of which is found in the English lexis.This asymmetry in language is also reflected at the grammatical level; it is not unusual to find a TL verb with a SL adjectival equivalent, or a SL noun that is expressed by a TL verb, and vice versa.
Even when a TL equivalent is believed to exist, it will be realized that the relationship between the two items the SL word and its TL equivalent is a very complex one: it could be one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one.In order for the dictionary to be adequate, homonymous and polysemous entries have to be explicitly stated in the source language.The dictionary user will need a great amount of detail to distinguish between the different senses of the entry itself as well as between the various synonyms given in the TL as translational equivalents and the concomitant restrictions that apply to their usage.The interlingual treatment of synonyms is particularly important as "true" synonyms are rarely found even within the same language.In implementing all this, the bilingual lexicographer has at his disposal a wide range of translation procedures which must be carefully cultivated: substitution, borrowing, paraphrase, literal translation, etc.
The selection of the appropriate translation procedure must be combined with another tendency that responds to the needs of the translator, namely giving preference to "insertable" equivalents rather than lengthy, explanatory definitions."The equivalents," says Akhmanova (1975), "should be of an insertable kind, i.e. capable of being used in actual texts and, preferably, monolexemic" (p. 127, quoted in Tomaszczyk, 1986).Zgusta (1986) similarly calls for the avoidance of definitions and explanations in favor of equivalents of the type proposed by Akhmanova, describing the process as "… a perfectly natural requirement.Lexicographers have followed it since time immemorial, but we also know that they have not succeeded in each and every case."(p.147).
But the major objection that is usually raised against bilingual lexicography is that although words are linguistic units operating in larger and more complex systems, the dictionary tends to deal with them as isolated or "context-free" elements (Marcinkeviciene,p. 53).This gap between text equivalence and dictionary equivalence has also been observed by Snell-Hornby ( 2001) who comments, "It is …. common knowledge among professional translators that a translated text is not merely a string of dictionary equivalents, and that the relationship between languages and cultures is far more complex than can be expressed by lexical equivalence" (p.538).
Moreover, actual language usage shows that words normally have more (at least potential) senses than those listed against them in the BD: According to Sharoff (2004): Dictionaries give translation equivalents for a headword, but words taken in their contexts can be translated in many more ways than indicated in dictionaries.The cause for the problem is that dictionaries cannot address the difference between the way concepts and words are combined in the source language vis-à-vis their potential combinations in the target language" (p.336) In line with the last item referred to above, Sharoff also emphasizes that the BD tends to provide the user with translational equivalents that belong to the same part of speech, ignoring the fact that translational equivalents may practically belong to any grammatical category (ibid, p. 337): a verb may be translatable by a noun, an adjective by a verb, etc.

Why does the BD fail the user?
In addition to the complexities of interlingual equivalence discussed in the preceding paragraph, the content and methodologies of the Arabic-English i.The dictionary may not list as entries or sub-entries all the words in a given language or domain.However, as we are dealing with general Modern Standard Arabic, no highly specialized terms are expected to be included in DMWA or Al-Mawrid though we expect lexical items of a general nature to be adequately covered.In this regard, one will note that as DMWA was first published in the early sixties and has never been updated, all general words and phrases that have entered the Arabic language since then are simply non-existent in the dictionary.To illustrate, the word computer ‫حاسوب‬ and all the related words do not appear therein.
ii.The dictionary fails to recognize all the possible senses and sub-senses of a given headword.Take for example the senses in which the verb ‫أخذ‬ is used and you will find that the following senses are missing altogether from DMWA: iii.The dictionary does not provide enough detail as to how one given sense or sub-sense is different from the other senses in the SL.An example of this problem is reflected in the Arabic verb ‫سما‬ as cited in DMWA where no explanations are given for the different senses in which the entry may be used in Arabic.As a result, the list of English synonyms given against it would not be of any real help to the user as the latter will simply fail to match the Arabic senses with their English equivalents: ‫‪:to‬سما‬ be high, elevated, raised, erect, lofty, tall, eminent, prominent; to rise high, tower up; to be above or beyond; to be to proud; to be too high or difficult, to be or go beyond the understanding of, exceed understanding; to rise; to be higher; to strive, aspire.
iv.The dictionary fails to identify the unique and strong collocations or the MWU's in the SL.The following examples represent just a fraction of the MWU's that can be listed under ‫أخذ‬ but do not appear in DMWA: The dictionary provides only a partial list of translational equivalents in the TL, either because of space constraints, failure to recognize potential English equivalents or sheer carelessness.For the sake of comparison, we will cite examples from Al-Mawrid and then give after them senses given to the same word or phrase in the author's dictionary, Al-Murshid: to fail, be unsuccessful, fizzle out, flop, miss the mark, lose ground, miss, be unable to do or become, miscarry, go wrong, come to nothing, be abortive Al-Murshid: to be a dead duck (inf) b. (an attempt, an initiative) to be abortive c. (a project) to be dashed to the ground d. (a candidate, a team) to be down for the count e. (an effort, a search) to be fruitless f. to be unsuccessful g. close, but no cigar (inf) h. to come a cropper/ unglued/ unstuck (spoken) i. (a plan, a project) to come to grief (inf) j. vi.The dictionary fails to distinguish between the different interlingual synonyms in some or all of the following: collocational ranges, register, level of formality, connotative meaning, partial difference in sense or syntactic restrictions under which the TL equivalent operates.From experience, this author can say that this particular problem has been one of the most evident and most difficult to deal with for the Arab user of the Arabic-English dictionary.When searching for an English equivalent of a certain Arabic word, the dictionary user will be faced by a long list of English synonyms with nothing that may help him choose the equivalent he actually needs.The problem is compounded because the procedure of rendering an Arabic word by a set of English single-word synonyms is quite common in the BD (Abu-Ssaydeh, 2001).The natural consequence is that students will, more often than not, produce written or translated texts that are not dissimilar to those obtained from Google Translate due to the lack of sufficient usage guidance given in the dictionary.Again, for the sake of illustration, we will cite representative examples from Al-Mawrid and Al-Murshid: a. Al-Mawrid: to break, breach, commit a breach of, violate, infringe, infract, contravene, transgress; to default, fail to meet or perform; to prejudice; to disturb, upset, disrupt Al-Murshid: to breach (an agreement, a law) b. to break (a law) c. to commit a breach (to conditions, the peace) d. to contravene (f) (a constitution, a covenant, a principle) e. to infract (a code, a an ordinance; upon rules) f. to infringe (laws, right; upon copyright) g. to transgress (the command of God, a tradition) h. to violate (an agreement, sanctions) a. to be angry (about; over a decision; with sb; at an article, an attitude) b. to be beside oneself with rage c. to be apoplectic/ boiling/ bristling/ choking/ crimson/ filled/ livid/ seething with rage d. one's face be contorted/ dark with rage e. to be boiling (with rage) f. to be enraged (at conditions; by a remark) g. to be incensed (at a suggestion; by a decision; over double standards; with an act)) h. to be furious (at customers) i. to be irate j. to be mad as hell k. to be hopping mad (at/with) l.
(a deity, a king) to be wrathful m. to open/ pour out the vials of one's wrath n. to be in a rage o. to fall/ fly into a rage p. to rage (against a situation; at a fate) q. to be with rage r. to be white with rage s. to be as mad as a wet hen/ as hell t. to be hopping mad u. to be steamed v. to be sick to one's stomach w. to be sore (at) x. to fly into a passion y. to froth at the mouth z. to fume aa. to do one's nut (slang) bb. to be infuriated (by) cc. to fly off the handle viii.The dictionary uses inappropriate translation procedures, for example by giving an explanation where a single word is sufficient, by failing to provide adequate equivalents for culture-specific words, by failing to find TL equivalents for non-lexicalized items or by not observing any prioritization of translation procedures.A case in point is the inadequate equivalents of the Islamic term ‫زكاة‬ (zakat) which can be translated in two ways: the first is to transliterate it and the second is to explain exactly what it is within the framework of Islam.Neither of these equivalents would match the ones given in Al-Mawrid which translates the term as almsgiving, alms, charity; alms tax.The same thing applies to the concept ‫َة‬ ‫ي‬ ْ ‫ز‬ ِ ‫ج‬ which the same dictionary translates as tribute; tax; poll tax; capitation though its exact definition is a poll-tax payable by non-Muslims living within an Islamic state in return for protection.The word Sheikh as a title for a ruler in the Gulf Region is well established in English and does not need to be explained as title of the ruler of any one of the sheikhdoms along the Arabian Gulf (DMWA).In fact, the word sheikhdom as a political entity in The Arabian Peninsula has been supplanted by ‫إمارة‬ (emirate).(This is not to question the lack of cultural sensitivity Wehr shows when he uses the term Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf).The word ‫طحينة‬ is cited more than three million times in Google as tahina/ tahini and deserves its place in English or, at least, it can be translated as sesame paste instead of a thick sauce made of sesame oil, and served with salads, vegetables, etc. ßaccording to DMWA.ix.The dictionary fails to recognize metaphors in the SL and/ or the TL or fails to utilize the metaphorical potential in the provision of interlingual equivalents.According to a study conducted by the author (Abu-Ssaydeh, forthcoming), it was found that out of fifty lexicalized metaphors in Arabic, Al-Mawrid failed to list twenty-eight whilst DMWA overlooks twenty-nine of these senses.This, and the fact that metaphors generate their own collocational ranges which may overlap with those of other synonyms, makes this feature a crucial one that needs to be represented in the dictionary through separate lemmatization, provision of collocations and explanations of meanings of lemmas.

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x.The dictionary misleads the user by allowing him to erroneously "translate" a phrase in the SL into a phrase in the TL though a single equivalent in TL can be used:

Al-Murshid: An Attempt towards a Hybrid Dictionary:
For language students and translators concerned with Arabic, it may be surprising to know that the most recent of the three major Arabic-English dictionaries currently in circulation was in fact compiled more than twenty years ago.The first of these lexicographic works -Lane's English-Arabic Lexicon -dates back to the nineteenth century, 1876 to be exact.In that year, an impressive attempt at the compilation of the first major Arabic-English dictionary for Classical Arabic came to an abrupt end when the famous British lexicographer Edward William Lane finally gave up the ghost at the age of seventy-four.At the time of his death, he had finished up to the letter Qaf, the twenty-first letter of the Arabic alphabet.The task of completing the dictionary was left to his great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole who patched up the incomplete notes of the celebrated lexicographer and published the remaining volumes of the dictionary twenty years later.The eightvolume incomplete masterpiece focuses on Classical Arabic as represented in Taj al-Arus, utilizes over a hundred language sources and organizes its material in accordance with the root of the word.It abounds in examples and citations from literature and Islamic texts.The second dictionary, (DMWA), appeared in 1961 as the English version of an Arabic-German dictionary called Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart.Of course, one can imagine the extent of change that has taken place in both the lexical content of the Arabic language and the methodology employed in the compilation of dictionaries at large over the past fifty years.The last of these, Al-Mawrid: A Modern Arabic-English Dictionary, was published in 1988 and has not been updated since then.
In 1983, I started collecting collocations for a legal dictionary.Over the years, I began to realize that a general bilingual collocational dictionary was a much more viable undertaking.Gradually and very slowly, data started to accumulate until I have collected over seven thousand pages of Arabic-English collocations.This process was expedited by the emergence of major lexical corpora, the first of which was the British National Corpus.Following the acquisition of a copy of the corpus, I realized, within a few years, that the size of the said corpus was still small by comparison to more recent work in the field such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English.By the time I was approaching the end of my task of compiling the collocational dictionary, I became painfully aware of the inadequacy of the general Arabic-English dictionary.It was decided, therefore, that the collocational project should be shelved for the time-being and that a fullfledged general Arabic-English dictionary be compiled taking as its base the data collected for the collocations project.This cumulative effort and six years of dedication have finally resulted in the production of Al-Murshid.In what follows, I will describe and illustrate in detail the methodology this dictionary employs.
To begin with, it must be acknowledged that there are problems the bilingual lexicographers will not be able to solve because they are peculiar to the BD.
Secondly, it has to be admitted that some of the complaints that the BD users have against the current BD may also be insurmountable.Beyond that, we will demonstrate that several changes can be made to the Arabic-English dictionary to make it more responsive to the actual needs of language learners and translators alike.
Al-Murshid is a general Arabic-English dictionary which aims to serve the needs of three major groups of users: AFL students, EFL students and practicing translators.Viewed from this perspective, it will be a hybrid dictionary that is used for the purposes of decoding as well as encoding, i.e. for text comprehension (e.g.reading) and for text production (writing and translation).A new methodology will be proposed which will, in my opinion, provide solutions to a number of the problems raised earlier and enable both language learners and translators to benefit from the dictionary.This attempt at "optimal retrieval" is attained through a careful and exhaustive examination of the different sub-senses of the Arabic entry, by disambiguating the senses and sub-senses of the entries themselves as well as their interlingual equivalents through a cyclic process, by the utilization of several features (including labeling) that are intended to create a greater degree and a much more sophisticated pattern of correspondence between the Arabic sense and its English equivalent(s), by providing collocations wherever and whenever possible, by expanding the notion of equivalence beyond the traditional categories in current dictionaries and, finally and by maximally exploiting the lexical resources of both languages in an exhaustive manner to create interlingual correspondence.
In this respect and in many others, Al-Murshid represents a radical departure from bilingual dictionaries currently available for users on the market.It is hoped that the ideas proposed here will find their application in other language pairs and that further suggestions can be made to improve the BD in the future.The following section will explain the microstructure of the dictionary and will seek to provide rationalization for the decisions that have been taken.

The Microstructure of Al-Murshid:
A. The Arabic component of the dictionary: i.The dictionary entries are listed alphabetically and in their canonical forms.I have resisted the frequent calls to organize the dictionary entries morphologically as the case is in Lane's and Wehr's dictionaries.It was decided that an alphabetized dictionary would provide easier access to the user.
ii.The grammatical class of the headword is indicated ‫الخ(‬ ‫ة,‬ َ ‫ف‬ ِ ‫ص‬ ‫ف,‬ ‫رْ‬ َ ‫ظ‬ ‫ف,‬ ‫رْ‬ ‫حَ‬ ‫ْل,‬ ‫فع‬ ‫.)اسم,‬ (Arabic grammarians do not differentiate between ‫م‬ ‫اسْ‬ and ‫ة‬ َ ‫ف‬ ِ ‫ص‬ or ‫;نعت‬ however, many colleagues I consulted agreed that such a distinction can be made if it serves a clear purpose in the dictionary).The noun headword is given in the singular masculine gender as is the adjective, and the verb is cited in its simple past form and marked for the third person, singular, masculine gender.iii.The major register to which the word belongs is given.The registers include iv.Examples of one or more collocates are often provided frequently along with an explanation of the meaning(s) of the different senses the word may have in Modern Standard Arabic.The purpose is to disambiguate the meaning and help contextualize the entry:

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vi.The Arabic senses are based primarily on dictionaries of Modern Standard Arabic, but classical dictionaries such as Lisanu L-'Arab were consulted whenever necessary.The purpose of the Arabic explanations of the sense is to ensure that the user will know which meaning he is looking up, because without this explanation, the entries and subentries will simply be lists of jumbled words and phrases that will not be of any practical help to the user.We must emphasize here that in giving an explanation of the Arabic entry, our purpose is not to make the Arabic part of Al-Murshid a monolingual dictionary; rather it serves to distinguish one sense or sub-sense of a given entry from another to avoid any confusion of the senses which the dictionary user may encounter in cases where the word is polysemous or homonymous.Moreover, every care has been taken to provide precise senses and to differentiate the sub-senses of the entry.For example, the Arabic word ّ ‫ي‬ ِّ ‫ِض‬ ‫ف‬ may mean made of silver (argentic, argentous, silver, silvery), covered in silver (silver, silvery), containing silver (argentic, argentous) or similar to silver (argentine, silvery).All these senses are set apart and explained in Arabic and the precise English equivalents are given to them.A host of strategies were used for definition purposes including synonymy ‫كيد(‬ ‫توْ‬ ‫ْراز:‬ ‫إب‬ ‫ع؛‬ ‫رجَ‬ ‫,)آب:‬ antonymy ‫اخلتف(‬ ّ ‫ضد‬ ‫,)اتفق:‬ contextualization: The different senses of the entry are listed in separate lines.These are followed by prepositional combinations (including phrasal verbs), unique and strong collocations and MWU's.Cases of polysemy (literal senses and metaphorical senses such as ‫ر‬ ‫جسْ‬ as a kind of supporting structure and ‫ر‬ ‫سْ‬ ِ ‫ج‬ in the sense of what connects, say, two civilizations and homonymy (distinct meanings of the same orthographic form like ‫ّد‬ ‫قي‬ to record and to fetter) are listed within the same lemma.MWU's categories include binomials )أه‬ All of these elements are organized alphabetically as well.
viii.The dictionary provides an abundance of strong collocations and mediumstrength collocations by comparison with other dictionaries.This decision is motivated by the fact that collocation "contributes greatly to one's idiomaticity and nativelikeness" (James,p. 152).(See also Thomas, 1984).Secondly, collocational patterning represents one of the most confusing areas for the language learner/ translator, especially in encoding, and is , therefore, "… a common source of error in L2 because learners tend to transpose L1 collocations directly into L2" (Cop and Reul,p. 797).Thirdly, their inclusion is significant as they "… can be more effective meaning discriminators than synonym glosses, which can be too vague" (ibid 805).The dictionary also cites the collocations under base and collocator headwords.MWU's, however, are listed under the first content word; for example, the unit ‫ها‬ ‫ُرّ‬ ‫وم‬ ‫ياة‬ ‫الحَ‬ ‫و‬ ْ ‫ل‬ ‫حُ‬ will be found under ‫و‬ ْ ‫ل‬ ‫حُ‬ while the unit ‫مات‬ َ ‫فات‬ ‫ما‬ would be listed under َ ‫فات‬ .The decision to combine collocations and MWU's together is intended to facilitate access to the item that needs to be looked up and the fact that occasionally the distinction between a strong collocation and a MWU is not that clear.This ordering is represented by the verb ‫أتى‬ below: For example, while Arabic has a generic term for hunting and catching fish (both of which are translatable by the word ‫ْد‬ ‫,)صي‬ English distinguishes not only between hunting (animals and birds) and fishing but also between hunting by using falcons (falconry) and hunting seals (sealery), all of which are represented by single English words.English also has a single word for ‫ة‬ َ ‫ف‬ ِ ‫عاص‬ storm, gale, tempest as it does for the Arabic Noun+Adjective combinations

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The dictionary user, particularly one with little knowledge of English or with limited dictionary skills will, in all probability, translate the Arabic phrases by English phrases, thus deviating from a lexical norm established by the English language.It was, therefore, decided that these should be included, though the list may not be exhaustive as this task requires a great deal of research: xiv.One sticky point that this author had to deal with was how to distinguish between the different synonyms that are cited as English equivalents to an Arabic entry when these synonyms demonstrate distinctions that are not self-evident to the dictionary user.One way of achieving this was to suggest a methodology that is rather debatable; namely to explain the differences in the denotational meaning in the Arabic component.Take the word ‫ب‬ ِ ‫قار‬ for example.Against this word we have no less than twenty English equivalents each of which has its own unique properties that distinguish it from the others.It was felt that the best way to deal with this dilemma is to explain the differences in Arabic so that the Arab user can identify which kind of boat he needs to use: We have followed the same approach in dealing with scores of words in the dictionary; in the word ‫َة‬ ‫ِماد‬ ‫,ك‬ for example, the different features incorporated in the words cataplasm, poultice, compress, fomentation and pack were culled from major English dictionaries and given in the Arabic senses.It must be acknowledged, nonetheless, that there are limits as to what the BD can do in this regard as such semantic distinctions are not always possible to capture and record consistently, elegantly and systematically in the dictionary.For example, the Arabic word ‫ر‬ ْ ‫ف‬ َ ‫ك‬ is translatable as a. small village b. hamlet.The second of these senses (hamlet) could technically be part of an English village, a settlement comprising a few houses, or, ecclesiastically speaking, one that does not have its own church.There are other dimensions in synonymy that the BD may not always be able to explicitly state either.For example, if we examine the words terror and horror, we will realize that there is a subtle time difference between them; horror arises from something that has already happened whereas terror signifies fear from something that has yet to happen.The word atheism does not carry with it the negative connotations its Arabic equivalent ‫حاد‬ ْ ‫ل‬ ِ ‫إ‬ does.The word fissure tends to prefer the noun rock as a collocate.The same remark can be made about the word shard which tends to collocate most frequently with pottery and, to a lesser extent, with glass and metal, at least according to major English dictionaries.The English word trepidation usually occurs with the word some, unlike its Arabic equivalent ‫ف‬ ‫وْ‬ َ ‫خ‬ which enjoys more collocational freedom.The regional dimension of the words pavement (British usage) and sidewalk (American usage) is totally absent from the Arabic equivalent ‫صيف‬ ‫.رَ‬These and other differences obtaining between the members of synonyms are facts every translator is aware of and every translated text has to tolerate, but it has to be conceded that the best place for their representation should perhaps be the monolingual dictionary.What future developments in bilingual lexicography can do to address these complexities is a matter of speculation.
xv.The dictionary introduces new headwords based on Arabic combinations that are emerging as compound words, including ‫غير‬ + adjective and ‫ل‬ ِ ‫قاب‬ + adjective: xvi.In certain cases where the Arabic word needed to be cited in the plural form due to usage, the existence of some strong collocations, its occurrence in a MWU or any other reason, the word is cited in the plural form: The English component of the dictionary: i. Different English equivalents are listed separately by means of italicized block English letters and, typically, one or more collocations are cited with them.These collocations have been culled, for the most part, from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and were based on those of the highest frequency.The use of collocations is crucial as the only difference between synonyms sometimes may be collocational and also because they help to contextualize the equivalent and, to some extent, help in disambiguating its sense: (a basement, a house) to be or become commodious f. (a city, facilities) to be or become extensive g. (a foyer, an interior) to be or become large h.(an apartment, a shed) to be or become roomy i. (a backyard, a lobby) to be or become spacious j. (a river, a road) to be or become wide iii.English MWU's are used extensively not only to reflect the abundance of this type of lexical units in the English language but also to optimize the lexical resources which the dictionary user can utilize in text production in the TL: metaphorically, one of the dimensions that set it apart from its literal counterpart is the change its collocations undergo.Secondly, when two synonyms are used metaphorically, their collocational ranges may partially overlap, but, quite often, they would be distinct.This is an issue where the dictionary user's awareness needs to be increased.The principle of selecting the collocational example(s) here is that it is either of a high frequency or it clearly indicates the metaphorical nature of its collocant.vii.One of the major issues the bilingual lexicographer has to tackle is translation procedures.Unfortunately, this topic, and despite its centrality to bilingual lexicography, has not been satisfactorily dealt with on its own in the literature, though different sets of translation procedures have been proposed by various researchers for various types of translation units.Due to the nature of this paper and space limitations, however, I will focus on a few specific issues, leaving the rest for future research.I shall start by dealing with Quranic words as they represent a very special case in this context then move on to other issues.
The identification of the senses of the Quranic words and, subsequently their translation(s), is not without challenges.To start with, some words are given different interpretations.For example, the word ‫صواع‬ in Surat Yusuf has been interpreted as a measure (i.e. in the sense of ‫)صاع‬ or a drinking cup.Other interpreters added the material of which the cup was made, with some saying it was silver.‫عود‬ َ ‫,ص‬ another word, has been interpreted either as the name of a mountain in Hell, a rock in Hell, a rock of fire or arduous torment.The same thing applies to the words ‫ريع‬ َ ‫ض‬ , ‫غساق‬ , ‫,يحموم‬ to mention only a few.Some Quranic words are used in several senses: the word ‫طوبى‬ , for example, is used in the senses of a tree in Heaven, Heaven itself and good things.Thirdly, some of the senses in which a given entry is used are very specific.For example, the word ‫صيحة‬ refers to the last blow in the horn on the Day of Judgment.The word ‫ليظ‬ َ ‫غ‬ is used to mean intensely painful (torture); ‫قات‬ ِ ‫الفار‬ means angels that distinguish between right and wrong; ‫ة‬ ‫رَ‬ ْ ‫ت‬ َ ‫ف‬ is a period between two prophets.‫ة‬ ‫رَ‬ ْ ‫ِط‬ ‫ف‬ , too, is used to mean the right path or Islam.None of these senses are the ones we would expect to find in the regular Arabic monolingual dictionary.Other words rarely occur in Modern Standard such as ( ‫الجبّ‬ ‫َة‬ ‫ياب‬ َ ‫)غ‬ the dark bottom (of the well) and ‫ِه‬ ‫فاك‬ in the sense of delighted or happy.Our policy in the dictionary was to include all the senses that the major English translations and dictionaries of the Holy Quran have given.Couplets (namely transliteration and paraphrase) were used in the translation of step in a discipline that is averse to risk (Atkins 1996).And while this author hopes that the theoretical underpinnings, the proposed methodology and the content of Al-Murshid have remedied, with a certain measure of success, some of the shortcomings of the current Arabic-English dictionaries, he strongly feels that the time is ripe for a change in this sub-discipline.This change should build on advances made in monolingual lexicography; in particular, it should identify a target group of users, use real language data, provide better definitions and/ or equivalents and redesign the BD microstructure so that more relevant material could be included and tapped more easily.The BD must also make maximum use of the lexical resources of both the SL and the TL, the findings of translation theory, theoretical linguistics, foreign language teaching and learning, insights of practicing translators and the tantalizing potential offered by corpus linguistics.These new horizons may necessitate a thorough rethinking of the role of the bilingual dictionary, the typology thus far applied to it and a break with the traditional binary divisions on which that typology is based.
But the prospects of bilingual lexicography should not stop at the threshold of the paper dictionary; with its almost limitless potential and the amazing range of applications it incorporates, the electronic and/ or the online dictionary will enable the lexicographer to significantly expand the range of features he can incorporate in his work.As demonstrated above, the Arabic component of the BD can be a full-fledged searchable monolingual dictionary.The range of collocations for the Arabic entry can be expanded, and collocations given for a certain word in English can be more exhaustive and organized in terms of high frequency on the basis of a large corpus such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English.The bilingual component of the dictionary may even include a network of bilingual collocations for a given Arabic word; the verb and the adjective will contain high-frequency adverbs and nouns, and the noun can be provided with the verbs, adjectives and prepositions that frequently combine with it in the two languages.The English component can also be turned into a monolingual dictionary with all the phonological, morphological, grammatical and usage details such a dictionary may be capable of providing for the user.This will most probably be the next step in bilingual lexicography; and when it happens, it will produce a decoding and encoding tool that will be more formidable than anything we have witnessed thus far.And who knows?Tomorrow may just be around the corner.

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University of SharjahJournal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 dictionaries in circulation in the Arab World fail the user in numerous ways and for a varied number of reasons which can be summed up in the following points.Illustrative examples will be taken from DMWA, Al-Mawrid and Al-Murshid.
a word; from a tree) 63 University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 ‫لى:‬ ‫عَ‬ ‫لى‬ ‫وْ‬ َ ‫ت‬ ‫ِسْ‬ ‫ا‬ : َ ‫ذ‬ َ ‫خ‬ َ ‫أ‬ a. to take possession of (a castle, a station) b. to appropriate (a site, wealth) c. to have (a 40% share) d. to possess e. to take hold of (a place)e ‫لى:‬ ‫عَ‬ ‫رَ‬ َ ‫ْط‬ ‫سي‬ : َ ‫ذ‬ َ ‫خ‬ َ ‫أ‬ a. to capture (a citadel, a city, a position) b. to control (coastal regions) c. to seize (a position, a town) d. to take over (a position) (efforts, expectations)  to come to nothing k. to fail l. (an attempt) to fall flat m. to fall flat on one's face (inf) n. to lay an egg (inf) o. (a coup, a plot) to fizzle out p. (a play) to flop (inf) q. (a plan) to go down the tube (inf) r. (a business, a company) to go belly up s. (a plan, a project) to jump the rails t. to miss the mark u. not to come to anything/ much v. to run aground w. to go wrong x.(a project) to miscarry y. (an attempt) to be abortive 65 University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015

vii.
The dictionary fails to maximally exploit the lexical potential of the TL, for example by not paying enough attention to MWU's as possible interlingual equivalents.The following example shows the equivalents given to the phrase ‫ًا‬ ‫غضب‬ ‫استشاط‬ in Al-Mawrid and Al-Murshid: Al-Mawrid: ‫ًا:‬ ‫غضب‬ ‫استشاط‬ to flame up with rage, flare up, fume, steam, seethe, boil, rage, storm, burst with anger, lose one's temper, be or become inflamed or enraged or furious 67 University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 Al-Murshid: University of SharjahJournal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015

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University of SharjahJournal for Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 room) to be or become ample b. (a plain) to be or become boundless c. (a street) to be or become broad d.(a backyard, a hall) to be or become capacious e.

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to take it upon oneself b. to take a matter in one's own hands Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 As the entries belong to Modern Standard Arabic, stylistic labels were not used in the Arabic component, though they are fairly prevalent in the English component of the dictionary.

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Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015