Film Terminology in the More Recent Single-Volume General Croatian Dictionaries

Abstract

The research of entry words related to film terminology in the Croatian dictionaries, as well as in the dictionaries of foreign words, was aimed at establishing the degree of presence of professional film terms, systematic quality of their selection, frequency of certain entry words in various dictionaries, and also the competence and relevance of the definitions themselves, and, finally, the cultural estimate of the foregoing. Even though film is a rather new phenomenon, it has been found that the reviewed dictionaries contain film terminology; if all the dictionaries are considered collectively, the overall number is quite significant. This may be considered to be an indication of an important presence of film in the day-to-day speech, which is in turn binding on the lexicographers. However, what was noticed in all the reviewed dictionaries is the lack of systematic incorporation of the entry words - a rather large number of one-off occurrences of the words, in only one dictionary, inclusion of marginal or not familiar terms while omitting some basic professional terms, a sort of haphazard selection of one or several synonyms in active use, and a type of neglecting of the papers dealing with the terminology issued in the professional film publications. This  reflects very unfavourably on the definitions of the terms, which are often uninformative and unclear, for both the layman and the expert, and which are also unsystematic with regard to the terminology. Having regard to the level of presence of film in daily life, the number of phrasemes based on figurative takeover of the film terminology and film names is highly indicative.