【经济学人】让字典不再老套|2016年10月29日|总第714期

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翻译 | 栏目四第一组

审核 | Mo

小编 | 毛毛

Johnson

约翰逊

Lexicography unbound

释放自由的字典编纂

Dictionaries have found their ideal format

字典找到了理想版式

Oct 29th 2016 | From the print edition

2016年10月29日|来自印刷版

THERE is something comforting in a dictionary: right angles, a pleasing heft, reassuringly rigid covers. A new one is tight, a bright sheaf of discoveries yet to be made; an old one is a musty but trusted cosy friend. A good dictionary is the classic school-leaving gift from ambitious parents to their children. A great dictionary might even be passed on through several generations.

在一部字典里，确实有些令人欢喜的地方：四四方方的角、合适的重量、高品质的硬面书皮。一部新的字典装订牢固，充满了许多令人惊喜的待挖掘之处；一部老字典带着发霉的味道，却成了我们值得信赖的亲密朋友。望子成龙的父母会把一部好的字典作为孩子的毕业礼物。一部好的字典甚至可以传承几代人。

But maybe the most reassuring thing about a dictionary is its finite nature. A small dictionary contains all the words you need to know, and a really big one seems to contain all the words in existence. Having one nearby seems to say that the language has boundaries, and reasonable ones at that.

但是也许最令人激动的是一部字典自身的有限性。一本小型字典涵盖了你需要知道的所有单词，同时一本大的字典则似乎饱含了所有存在的的词汇。身边备着本字典似乎意味着：语言是有界限的，并且这些界限来得很合理。

It might surprise dictionary-owners to know that most lexicographers do not think of their subject in this way at all. The decision to impose a page-count on a dictionary is in fact a painful one. Definitions can almost never cover the full complexity of a word, even in huge dictionaries. And even more painful is leaving words out simply for reasons of space.

然而对字典所有者来说，令人惊讶的是：大部分词典编纂者丝毫不这么认为。给字典设置页数限制着实痛苦。因为即使是一本很厚的字典，单词的定义也无法完全囊括该词的复杂性。更让人痛苦的是有一些词不记入字典，仅仅是因为篇幅问题。

Many readers think that something is a “real word” if it’s “in the dictionary” (raising the question of which of the hundreds of English dictionaries they mean). But lexicographers don’t like to regard themselves as letting the trusty words in and keeping the bad guys out. Erin McKean, who left traditional lexicography to found an online dictionary, Wordnik, explained why she chose a format that could allow virtually limitless entries: “I don’t want to be a traffic cop!”

许多读者认为如果这个词出现在字典中，它才真正算是一个真正的词（人们的问题会在数以百计的字典中找到答案）。但是编纂者并不想成为一个只让可靠的词纳入词典，忽略不好词汇的人。艾琳 麦基恩辞掉了传统的字典编纂工作，创立了网上词典——Wordnik。艾琳还解释了她选择这种形式，是因为它实际上对词目，词条无限制，说道：“我可不想做一个词语交警！”

Lexicographers prefer to think they are a different kind of cop: the kind in the title of John Simpson’s “The Word Detective”, published in October, a memoir of his time as editor-in-chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Mr Simpson’s lexicography career began in the 1970s, scouring books for example usages and writing them down on notecards. (The original OED was published in alphabetically consecutive volumes between 1884 and 1928; Mr Simpson worked on the supplement of new words and meanings.) In 1982 a new boss shocked the then-editor with a plan to computerise the dictionary’s ways: both the lexicographic work itself, with digital research files, and its outcome, an OED on compact disc. But that wasn’t the final shape either: by the end of Mr Simpson’s tenure in 2013, the OED’s flagship product was a website with entries richly linked to one another and updated at regular intervals.

字典编纂者倾向于认为他们是一种特殊的警察，就是约翰 辛普森所说的“ 文字侦探”， 这本书于10月出版，记录了他当牛津英文词典总编辑的岁月。约翰的词典编纂生涯始于19世纪70年代，他过去常常从书中找出惯例用法，然后记录到笔记卡上。（传统上的牛津词典在1884到1928年间出版了按字母顺序的连续卷，约翰增补了一些新的单词和新的意思。）1982年，新上任的领导准备用计算机处理的方法来编纂词典，这让那时的编辑很是吃惊：编纂与数字研究文档结合起来的结果就是把词典做成便于携带的光盘，但这还不是最终的版本。2013年，辛普森任期结束的时候，《牛津词典》的旗舰产品是一个词条丰富，和其他网站链接，定期更新的网站。

A dictionary is really a database; it has fields for headword, pronunciation, etymology, definition, and in the case of historical dictionaries like the OED, citations of past usages. Its natural home is one that allows the reader to consult it in any way that makes sense. Look up a single word. Or look up all the citations by a single author. Or those which share a root: only such a tool can tell you that the OED knows of 1,011 words ending in –ology, against 508 with –ography.

一部词典真的就是一所语料库；它包括词目，发音，语源，定义以及在那种老字号的字典中会引用过去的用法，比如《牛津词典》。能够让字典拥有者以任何角度查询都能够解释得通，是字典的自然属性。你可以查阅一个单词，可以查阅某位作者的引用，或者看哪些词共享一个词根：例如《牛津词典》可以告诉你1011个以-ology结尾的单词，而以ography结尾的单词仅有508个。

When a new word like “grok” appears or the word like “marriage” expands, as it has recently, readers need not wait for years for a new print dictionary. Once the new word or meaning seems here to stay, it can be added in an instant. The OED is conservative: a rule of thumb is to wait until a word has hung on for at least ten years. But the principle is to catch all of the language in use, and not merely to admit the good words, whatever those are.

当一个新词的出现，比如：“grok”神交这个词，或者像“婚姻”这个词的扩展意，立刻就可以得到它的意思，读者们不用等多年后，再次新出版的词典中获取。一旦一个新词或者一个新意有人提出，它就会立即被加入词条。牛津词典比较保守：它坚守一条很重要法则就是这个词至少使用10年以上才会被纳入词典。但是字典的原则是捕捉所有在用语言，而不仅仅是只吸收好的词语。

Ten years is still a long time. Lexicographers, aware that people still look to them for guidance on what is a “real” word and what isn’t, whether or not they like this role, can still be conservative. Those who long for a conservative dictionary should seek one, but this is not the only way of doing things. “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” first appeared as a chunky three-volume work of historical lexicography in 2010, with over 100,000 entries. But Jonathon Green did not hang up his hat when the books hit the shelves; he went on to add an online edition that was to be continually updated.

10年依旧很漫长。因为人们依赖于编纂者们在词语上的引导，即哪些可以纳入词典成为一个有名分的词，无论字典编纂者们是否喜欢担当这样的角色，编纂者依旧坚持保守的原则。那些偏好保守字典的人可以用保守型字典，但这不能要求所有人都用保守型字典。《格林俚语词典》在2010年首次出版是被作为一本厚重的3卷历史词典，该字典收录了超过100，000个词目。但是，当词典上架后，乔纳森 格林也没有停止工作。他继续在网站上增补，编辑，不断更新。

At the free-for-all end are the online and completely crowdsourced dictionaries from Wiktionary to Urban Dictionary. Whatever one may think of the latter—which includes terms of rank racist and misogynist abuse as well as a broad fare of drug- and sex-related terms—it is useful, allowing oldies to find out what their kids are talking about. That may be an inversion of the old dictionary, the graduation present—but discovery, in whatever format, is after all what dictionaries are for.

公开、免费的另一面是流传于网络的、采取完全众包形式的字典，例如《维基词典》到《城市词典》。期待您的翻译。这很有可能颠倒了过去可当作毕业礼物的字典形象，然而，无论以什么形式，这些新式字典所追求的依旧是所有字典所坚持的。

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