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Translational Equivalents for Culture-Specific Words in Chinese-English Dictionaries

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13250))

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Abstract

As an indispensable element of the language, Chinese culture is particularly attractive to learners, whereas it remains to be a challenge because of its profound history and complex background. The present study collects a group of typical Chinese culture-specific words (CSWs) and examines the adoption of translational equivalents for those CSWs in four Chinese-English dictionaries with different target reader groups. It shows that as compared to the dictionaries for general purposes, those dictionaries intended for Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL) learners prefer to provide a larger amount of encyclopedic explanation to meet user’s needs. A combination of translational equivalents plus explanation is the major means adopted by those dictionaries. Furthermore, the inappropriateness of certain translational equivalents suggests the necessity for a close scrutiny of various aspects in the process of equivalent identification, including sense discrimination between different target language words, context information of the potential equivalents, and cultural connotation of each constituent part of an equivalent.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

    Qian Li

Authors
  1. Qian Li
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Correspondence to Qian Li .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yanhui Gu

  3. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

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Li, Q. (2022). Translational Equivalents for Culture-Specific Words in Chinese-English Dictionaries. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06546-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06547-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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