A Contrastive Study of English-Persian Dictionaries

Abstract

The inevitable changes that all aspects of a language undergo require lexicographers, especially those who compile bilingual dictionaries, to stay abreast of the latest changes. Each dictionary, indirectly, reveals the compiler's style, his knowledge of the source and target languages, and his knowledge of lexicography. This paper endeavors to undertake a contrastive study of four English-Persian dictionaries: Aryanpour (1377), Bateni (1369), Ja'fari (1383) and Haghshenas (1381). The contrastive study focuses on three areas 1. Semantic categorization, accuracy in choosing equivalents, and semantic domain 2. Grammatical usage and abbreviations, and 3. Phonetic transcription. At the end of each chapter a brief assessment of the above mentioned dictionaries will be provided. The wide-range uses of these dictionaries by students, language learners, researchers and, most especially, translators make such studies indispensable. However, this paper is not to find faults in the dictionaries, since the painstaking task of dictionary writing is clear to the users.