Optimization Of Pictorial Illustrations In Bilingual Dictionaries

Since ancient times, pictorial illustrations have been included in religion, literature, dictionaries, pictorial handbooks and so on to feature a supplement of the words. In UK and USA, various dictionaries started to use lots of pictorial illustrations in twentieth century. Pictorial illustrations in many English learners dictionaries have been improved not only in quantity but also in quality such as Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) and Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (MEDAL) which are the four most popular and influential monolingual learner’s dictionaries. Although native lexicographers have realized the importance of pictorial illustrations, the role of them is not paid as much attention as it should be and it can be noticed that large and medium-sized English-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionaries rarely include pictorial illustrations.This study firstly makes a literature review about pictorial illustrations in dictionaries including the disputes of allocating pictorial illustrations in bilingual dictionaries, major findings of former researches, existing problems and so on. Secondly, the thesis introduces basic information about the classification about pictorial illustrations in term of color, arrangement, media, content, words to be illustrated, criteria to include pictorial illustrations and functions of pictorial illustrations which is supported by cognitive theories. Thirdly, a comparison of pictorial illustrations in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries is made to find out the advantages of monolingual dictionaries and disadvantages of bilingual dictionaries. Through the analysis, it is found that the four English learners dictionaries have done better in applying pictorial illustrations than English-Chinese dictionaries do so it is suggested that English-Chinese dictionaries borrow the merits form English learners dictionaries with some optimizations listed to make up for their drawbacks.Last, the thesis makes a conclusion about the research and points out some remaining problems and provides some suggestions for future study.