An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Dictionary Types On The Translation And Acquisition Of Business English New Words

The dictionary is an important tool in English as a foreign language(EFL) acquisition especially in the aspect of incidental Vocabulary acquisition through linguistic activities such as(L2-L1/L1-L2) translation.It is of course also useful for the linguistic activity itself.The present empirical study investigated the effect of different dictionary types on the translation and acquisition of business English(BE) new words,with the purpose of finding out which type of dictionary should be adopted in the English-Chinese(E-C) translation and acquisition of BE words,and in the compilation of a BE learner's dictionary.The.subjects of the study were 136 Chinese students majoring in BE from Guangdong Vocational & Technical Institute of Industry and Trade,whose ages were between 17 and 19 years old.They were similar in English proficiency and had finished courses of BE and international trade-They were eyenly divided into three groups,who were required to translate 20 English sentences,each containing a target BE new word,into Chinese with the help of three different types of dictionaries(monolingual,bilingual and bilingualised dictionaries).The instruments used in the research were a translation test and two(?)tention tests.The translation test was conducted to test the translation quality of the target words with the use of different types of dictionaries and the vocabulary retention tests were designed to assess subjects' retentiort of the meanings of the target words in different dictionary conditions(The retention of word meanings is one important aspect of vocabulary acquisition.).The im(?)di(?) tion test was administered immediately after the subjects' translation test,and the delayed retention test was administered one week later.The data collected in the translation test and retention tests were computed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences(SPSS).The results of the research indicate that(1) in terms of the translation quality of BE new words,the bilingualised dictionary was the best,followed by the bilingual dictionary,with the monolingual dictionary as the least effective tool, and(2) in terms of both the immediate and the delayed retention of BE word meanings,the bilingualised dictionary was the most effective tool of the three. The bilingual dictionary took the second place,while the monolingual one was the least effective one.Therefore,the bilingualised dictionary was found to be the most effective type of dictionary in terms of both translation and acquisition of BE new words.The above findings were discussed with a theoretical model of dictionary use and E-C translation of BE words and retention of BE word meanings.Based upon the findings,the implications for E-C translation of BE words, for acquisition of BE words,and for BE learner's dictionary compilation were put forward for BE teaching.