Multidimensional Discrimination Of English Equivalents In Domestic-oriented Chinese-English Dictionaries

The domestic-oriented Chinese-English dictionaries(CEDs for short),often indexed by Chinese characters,are aimed at facilitating Chinese EFL learners to fulfill their active learning tasks,such as translation and writing,and English equivalents can be treated as synonyms under the same Chinese headword in these CEDs.However,most of the domestic-oriented CEDs only emphasize the provision of English equivalents,while ignore the differences between English equivalents,which may render students a lot of inconvenience.Therefore,the synonymous discrimination of English Equivalents is a problem that cannot be ignored.This paper attempts to systematically deal with the analysis of English equivalents from multidimensional angles in current CEDs.This study reviews the previous researches on English equivalent discrimination from different aspects,and founds out that although lexicographers make great effort to improve and optimize English equivalent discrimination,shortcomings still exist.Moreover,the interview survey and a comparative analysis of dictionaries are conducted in order to find out the problems of Chinese EFL learners in discriminating English equivalents.The results show that Chinese EFL learners have problems in the analysis and selection of English equivalents under the same Chinese headword.They hope that collocation,examples and pragmatic information of the English equivalents can be presented in the English equivalents discrimination of the dictionary.Discrimination box,usage notes,and instructions are expected as well to discriminate subtle differences.Therefore,it is necessary to add adequate discrimination information to analyze the differences of English equivalents in the CEDs.It is also beneficial to increase the presentation of semantic information to help Chinese EFL learners understand English equivalents and acquire these words.On the one hand,native speakers of Chinese can use the information in the dictionary to understand the subtle differences in synonyms which are expressed in the English language,thereby making the English translation and writing more idiomatic.On the other hand,English-speaking userscan discern the nuances of Chinese synonyms by analyzing the information in the dictionary so that they can avoid making mistakes when using Chinese to make sentences.Therefore,based on the precious researches,this study will apply effective methods to improve English equivalent discrimination: CEDs should discriminate English equivalents from the aspect of semantic discrimination,collocational discrimination,pragmatic discrimination and syntactic discrimination.The findings are hopefully beneficial for the compilation of CEDs and second language learning for Chinese EFL learners.