Remedying Deficiencies in Japanese-English Dictionaries: Types of Unentered Useful Words and Phrases

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K02898
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Waseda University
• Principal Investigator: Yamada Shigeru 早稲田大学, 商学学術院, 教授 (60298130)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: 和英辞典 / 二言語辞書 / 発信型辞書

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The Japanese-English dictioanry is intended to help Japanese to produce texts in English. It gives English equivalents for Japanese headwords. Since the two langueages are linguistically far apart, because of the dictionary's basic structure, there appears to be useful, basic English lexical items enevitably unentered.
This study used Longman Wordwise Dictionary as a source which provides core English information to be used by Japanese for productive purposes. From this English dictionary, words and expressions which are supposed to escape inclusion from the Japanese-English dictionary because of its basic structure are picked, and their non-inclusion was checked through the examaple-sentence search function of a hand-held electronic dictionary.
It has been found out that it is difficult for the Japanese-English dictioanry to capture English items which do not translate well into Japanese and multiple-function grammatical items which transcend translation (e.g., participles).

Free Research Field

辞書学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

和英辞典が使いづらいことの一因として、日本語の見出し語に英語の等価表現を配する基本構造に着目した。どのような表現が和英辞典に収録されにくいか、中級学習英英辞典を基に該当表現を探り、電子辞書の例文検索機能を用い搭載和英辞典に収録されているか否かを調べ、一定のバターンを導き出したことには価値がある。またこれは、和英辞典の編集に、英語から日本語へという方向性を示唆するもので斬新である。