Principles of dialect dictionary translation

The article describes the problems of renderinglexicographical information to foreigners. The readers' attention is often concentrated on the ideaof translating explanatory dictionaries that reflect the lexical systems of language into otherlanguages. As the national linguistic picture of the world is not confined to the literary languagesolely, the idea is justified of translating dialect dictionaries as peculiar ''accumulators'' ofnational specificity, the linguistic one, in the first place.Translating a dialect dictionary may be an experiment aimed at solving the problem ofscopes of translation, national specificity explication in a foreign language. This could be atype of translation different from technical or literary ones. The experiment may result in acomparison, unique in form and content, of two (as a minimum) linguistic pictures of theworld. Three systems must be considered: source language dialect, literary source language(as dictionary entries are given in literary language forms), and literary target language. Inorder to solve the problems of translating works in linguistics in general, and dictionaries inparticular, a meta-language should be created with its terminology subsystem, a certainmediator in the process of translation.The result of translating a dictionary can help solve some urgent lexicographicalproblems, e.g. head-word presentation, which could be given in its authentic form with atranscription reflecting the unit's pronunciation in the given dialect; presentation ofgrammatical and stylistic comments, models of translating the unit's lexical meaning, etc.The translated version of the dictionary should contain original texts in sourcelanguage. A minimum of word-for-word translation of the contexts is required to define therole of the word explained in the structure of the phrase.Dictionary entries may include brief etymology information and/or derivationalstructure description - the history of the dialect word.Thus, such a dictionary is an example of lexicographical activity of a certain kindaimed at solving the issues that so far have not attracted attention of specialists inlexicography, translation, dialect studies, linguistic aspects of culture and others.

Keywords

Authors

References