An Analysis Of The Microstructure Of Bidirectional Bilingual Dictionary

In recent years, with the rapid development of economic cooperation and cultural exchange between China and foreign countries, the great importance of Chinese and Chinese culture accelerates the compilation of Chinese-Foreign language dictionaries. This situation requires the dictionary to meet the needs of both native learners and non-native speakers; therefore, the bidirectional bilingual dictionary emerged. However, the realization of a bidirectional bilingual dictionary is a challenge both in theory and practice. Besides, the quality of dictionary, especially the microstructure of dictionaries, impacts directly on readers. The present study aims at analyzing and discussing the microstructure of bidirectional bilingual dictionaries from three key aspects, which are labeling, definition and illustrative examples, intending to improve the quality of Chinese-Foreign language dictionaries.Grand Contemporary Chinese-French Dictionary (hereafter GCCFD for short; Huang Jianhua,2014) is the largest Chinese-French dictionary ever compiled by Chinese scholars, which bears many innovative design features and embodies decades of lexicographical exploration by Huang Jianhua. This thesis taking the dictionary as a case, and referring to other large-sized Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries in China, investigates the characteristics of its microstructure. The study, on the one hand, fills the gap for the research of large-sized Chinese-French dictionary; on the other hand, provides enlightenment for the practice and theory for compiling bidirectional bilingual dictionaries.The thesis is structured in six parts. It firstly discusses the labeling, especially POS labeling, by a comparative study. Besides, the author describes the foreign-oriented designs of labeling in GCCFD. Then, centered on the most crucial issue of definition, the equivalents, the author provides ways of giving definitions, and proposed ways of addressing the problems of definition. Finally, the thesis discusses the type, the quantity and also the quality of illustrative examples, combined with the examples from GCCFD. By discussing the three aspects of microstructure of bidirectional bilingual dictionary, the study demonstrates that the Grand Contemporary Chinese-French Dictionary is audience oriented:Native learners first, foreign learners second. Based on the inadequacy of the dictionary, some suggestions are proposed which might be beneficial for improving the microstructure of Chinese-French dictionary and bidirectional bilingual dictionary in the future.