شح الأمثلة التوضيحية في المعاجم الثنائية (إنكليزي-عربي)‎

Abstract EN

This study paper sheds light on the problem of scarcity of illustrative examples in bilingual (English-Arabic) dictionaries compared with monolingual (English-English) dictionaries.

Due to scarcity of illustrative examples, bilingual dictionaries tend to have been inefficient in rendering meanings of words without referring to their contextual ones, users having been misled by vague meanings and usages, become less trustful of bilingual dictionaries, and highly opinionated of monolinguals, as a result, users are tempted to shift to monolinguals, and this undoubtedly weakens their ties with their mother tongue.

The researcher employs a number of examples taken from both types of dictionaries to illustrate the difficulty of rendering the meanings of words aloof from their contextual examples.

Besides, students have been asked to fill in a questionnaire designed by the researcher for this purpose.

Having collected and analyzed the data, the researcher is stressing the importance of incorporating more illustrative examples in bilingual dictionaries in the future.