Have I got the wrong definition of_?: how to write technical definitions on the basis of examples taken from Newsgroup discussions
- Autores: Elisa Corino, Cristina Onesti
- Localización: E-lexicography in the 21st century: New challenges, new applications : proceedings of eLex 2009, Louvain-la Neuve, 22-24 october 2009 / Sylviane Granger (ed. lit.), Magali Paquot (ed. lit.), 2010, ISBN 978-2-87463-211-2, págs. 387-392
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This contribution is meant to point out the deficiencies of monolingual dictionaries concerning common technical language. Our study is based on the observation of some issues discussed in newsgroup messages dealing with Motor vehicles, in both Italian and English, which were taken from a subset of the NUNC (Newsgroup UseNet Corpora) suite of multilingual corpora. The study has revealed that technical meanings are often neglected in dictionary entries and users often run into difficulties. Such problems have a twofold explanation: on the one hand, entries are not really comprehensive of all the possible meanings; on the other hand, explanations are sometimes not clear enough. We investigate how definitions can be improved, pointing out some problems detected in dictionaries and reported dircctly by users in thcir posts, outlining a sample definition for technical terms by considering some of the key problems of lay users facing Language for Specific purposes (LSP), and the strategies used by "experts" to make a term clear, as regards both structure and words used. The findings shed light on somc problems of technical definitions in monolingual dictionaries and provide useful information to improve them.
