Is a Hybrid Bilingual Dictionary a Tenable Proposition?

Abstract

Over the past three decades, great strides have been made in the field of pedagogical monolingual dictionaries in English. By comparison, the content, methodology and the primary functions of the bilingual dictionary (BD) have remained largely unaltered. Research and experience in the fields of translation and AFL/EFL within the Arabic context, however, indicate that the status quo of the Arabic-English dictionary is untenable as present dictionaries are evidently not only inadequate but are likely to lead to errors of usage. Therefore, it is felt that extensive modifications need to be made to the Arabic-English dictionary in order to make it more pedagogically oriented for foreign learners and more responsive to the actual needs of Arab translation professionals and language learners. The proposal will result in the production of a hybrid dictionary intended for decoding and encoding purposes. The methodology, content and functions, served by this hybrid dictionary as well as the vast potential offered by electronic lexicography mean that traditional dichotomies in dictionary typology thought to be mutually exclusive need to be reconsidered. Equally, more scholarly attention should be paid to this new kind of hybrid dictionary.