Delimitations in bilingual Croatian-English and English-Croatian lexicography and translation (Caveat lexicographus)

Abstract

Meaning delimitation as a standard procedure in writing, editing, and compiling (bilingual) dictionaries, as well as in translation, is language dependent. Sometimes it refers to the analysis of word formation, but more frequently requires a morphosyntactic analysis of the lexical unit. The introduction gives a short comparison of the two languages, Croatian and English, discussing lexicographic procedures necessary in preparing a bilingual dictionary up to applying a lexicographic decision rule. Chapter 2 discusses specificities of bilingual dictionaries and the methodology of writing dictionary entries, especially in the case of two unrelated languages such as Croatian and English, giving preference to the use of relevant resources such as contexts (especially corpora). Chapter 3 deals with headwords in the Croatian language that require disambiguation, even for native speakers. The examples discussed in separate subchapters are: Croatian adjectives ending in -iv, -jiv, or -ljiv (e.g. jestiv, jediv, and jedljiv); contextual delimitations of neuter gender adjectives and of adverbs (e.g. kazneno pravo, kazneno goniti); present participial adjectives, verbal adverbs and gerunds (e.g. umirući); past participial adjectives and adjectives (e.g. rođen and rođeni); adverbs and prepositions (e.g. poslije); and adverbials and prepositional phrases (e.g. nàgore, nȁgorē and na gore). Further on, cases of polysemy (e.g. zemlja), homophony (e.g. sûd), and homonymy (e.g. prȁvo as a neuter form of an adjective and as an adverb), ways of denoting actions vs. documents, and finally cases of false friends are reviewed. Specificities of the English language, characterised by numerous varieties (primarily BrE and AmE), are dealt with in Chapter 4. Some differences of orthographic nature (e.g. dialogue and dialog), as well as lexical ones (exemplified by legal and road/railway traffic terminology), are pointed out. In addition, the multifunctionality of word forms in English (e.g. drive, as a verb or a noun); syntactic and morphosyntactic features of meanings (articles, singular/plural, e.g. end of a/the/0 day/s/), multiword expressions (e.g. golden parachute), polysemy (e.g. stock), homonyms, homographs and homophones (e.g. bank as an institution or an edge of a watercourse), synonyms (e.g. freedom and liberty), paronyms (e.g. proscribe and prescribe), false friends (e.g. billion compared to Croatian bilijun), culture-based language imprints (e.g. Dear John letter), and verbs expressing negative meanings in English (e.g. ignore) are delineated. For the most part, examples given in the article are provided from dictionaries (Gačić, 2010 and 2019) and corpora. Chapter 5 closes the paper with some concluding remarks, emphasising the necessity of applying of the described procedures of delimitation and disambiguation of meanings in bilingual lexicography and in translation, mainly through texts, corpora, and contrastive analysis.