The Construction Of A Multidimensional Evaluation System For Chinese-English Dictionaries From User Perspective

With the rapid development of cross-cultural communication, learning English is increasingly popular in China. As an indispensable tool in English learning, Chinese-English Dictionary(CED) has gradually become better both in content and form. Meanwhile, as the core of theoretical lexicography and the driving force of improving the quality of dictionaries, CED criticism has received wide attention as well.CED is the most active bilingual dictionary, and reviews on it are large in quantity. In order to reveal the true picture of CED reviews, the present study has made a thorough investigation into 172 reviews on CEDs published on 23 core and authoritative periodicals in China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI). It is found that reviews surveyed are mainly introductory and descriptive instead of evaluative. And user's needs are not well embodied in these reviews. Moreover, inadequacies like implicit purposes, unclear criteria and vague terms etc. are relatively serious. Based on Reception Theory and Emergency Theory and fully considering user's cognitive needs, the present study aims at systematically establishing a multidimensional evaluation system for CEDs from three dimensions, namely evaluation subject, object and the paradigm and route of evaluation, concerning authorship, evaluation purpose, tone, content, principle, method, perspective and criteria. Moreover, case studies and comparative analysis will be conducted to testify the validity and operability of the evaluation system.Dictionary criticism is one of the main components of lexicography, but user's needs are ignored in traditional studies. And due attention is not paid to studies on evaluation purpose, principle and method and so on. Therefore, the present study is of great theoretical and practical significance. For one hand, the evaluation system will enrich and promote the development of theoretical research of bilingual dictionary criticism, and provide a theoretical basis for CED criticism and the whole bilingual dictionary criticism; for the other hand, the evaluation system can effectively guide CED evaluation, improve the quality of reviews on CEDs and promote the compilation of them, so that user's needs can be better satisfied.