cac.ophony.org

In my spare time (well, in my spare *work* time), I am working as a writer for a Japanese-English dictionary. I have been involved with this series of ESL dictionary projects for a number of years now, and although I have done two English-Japanese learners’ dictionaries, it is my first time to work on a Japanese-English dictionary. The work can be tedious sometimes, but it is an interesting experience.

The writing of ESL dictionaries is significantly different from the writing of the English dictionaries that most of the readers here may be familiar with (OED, etc.) in the sense that it involves a lot of cross-linguistic (mental) activities. Especially, for this Japanese-English dictionary, the editors keep emphasizing to us how we must provide real-life expressions, those that people actually use, rather than the literal translation of the given word that traditional Japanese-English dictionaries have been criticised for listing uselessly. In this sense, this work is aiming to shape up as an organized collection of expressions, not a list of words or grammatical explanations about the words.

To give you a very simple example, for the entry that typically stands for ’stomach’, I am to first come up with expressions in JAPANESE that we actually use, including ’stomach is empty’. Of course, no one says ‘my stomach is empty’ in English. Then, I provide the equivalent expressions that we actually use in ENGLISH, ‘I am hungry’. Furthermore, when you want to say you are very hungry, in Japanese you say something like ’stomach is very empty’, which should be expressed in English as something like ‘I am very hungry’, ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I am starving’, which might be more ‘real’.

Also, you might have noticed that in the Japanese that I provided above, ’stomach is empty’, there is no determiner. It is absent in Japansese. In Japanese, you tend do omit personal pronouns, whereas English requires one; when you say ‘I went to school’ in English, they say ‘went to school’, which is usually enough for the hearer to know that the person who went to school is the speaker. Using of a personal pronoun is always possible but, when you used it redundantly, the sentence becomes less natural. Hence, in the dictionary I work on, I am expected to omit the personal pronouns in the Japanese sentences wherever I can, to make it more ‘real’.

Working on these things makes me remember the old days when I studied English at school. In the translation exercises, which were a lot, we always had to translate everything in full: when there is an ‘I’, you have to always spell out the ‘I’. As a result, all the Japanese sentences translated from English were really weird. I think it was part of the reason why, in our mind, ‘School English’ was never real English and no matter how well you know School English, you never feel like actually knowing the real English.

I hope this new dictionary, a collection of ‘real’ English expressions that I deliver from my experience using the real English here, will help the students a bit with their long endeavor to acquire communication skills in the ‘real’ English.