Towards the making of a contextual English-Arabic dictionary

Abstract EN

English-Arabic lexicography has received little attention in the literature.

It is a fact that most of general-purpose English-Arabic dictionaries are products of single authors; consequently, they suffer from some weaknesses.

They are based on a sense-enumeration technique, which assumes that a multi-sense word has a fixed set of meanings, which makes it impossible for such types of dictionaries to account for meanings of a word in novel contexts.

Moreover, most of these dictionaries provide decontextualized equivalents to the different senses of their lexical entries; therefore, translators, learners of English as a second/foreign language, and teachers consulting English-Arabic sense enumerative dictionaries always find difficulties in choosing suitable equivalents due to the ence of contextual clues.

Thus, this paper aims at discussing weaknesses of English-Arabic dictionaries and proposing a way of making a contextual English-Arabic dictionary.

The paper focuses on two main issues: lexical coverage and meanings in contexts.

The proposed dictionary suggests making use of information technology, as it is unimaginable, especially with this worldwide desire for digitization, to compile a dictionary without resorting to available sources of IT.

The suggested dictionary could be made by eclectic compilation of lexical entries from the specialized dictionaries of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, in addition to some English-English corpus-based dictionaries, and some other English-Arabic sources.

Moreover, two major corpora can be used to provide necessary contextual cues: the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corona Virus Corpus.

To avoid limitations of folio editions, the suggested dictionary is an electronic one.