Bilingual Lexicography: Translation Dictionaries Arleta Adamska-Sałaciak* Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland Abstract The present chapter examines the peculiarities of lexicography linking two languages. It addresses the following broad issues: Can bilingual dictionaries legitimately be called translation dictionaries? What language pairs do they normally cover? Who uses them? What are the most persistent problems faced by bilingual lexicography and what time-honored theoretical assumptions are they grounded in? Why is lexicographic equivalence a problematic notion? How is the bilingual dictionary currently changing and what is its future likely to be? The discussion is preceded by a few words of general introduction. Introduction The bilingual dictionary is a dictionary par excellence. It was born in response to a genuine practical need (to understand texts and utterances in a foreign language) and is still predominantly a useful practical tool rather than – as is often the case with large monolingual dictionaries – an essentially symbolic object which confers status upon the owner but is rarely taken off the shelf. Despite the bilingual dictionary’ s clearly man-made origins, its historical development in the West can be thought of as a kind of organic growth. Rather than having been designed in a single step, with all its current features in place from the start, it evolved gradually from something much more basic: vernacular explanations (glosses) of individual foreign words and phrases, written by medieval scribes in between the lines and in the margins of Latin manuscripts. Later, the native glosses, paired with the foreign words they were meant to explain, started to be collected into separate lists (glossaries). Later still, when the glossaries had grown too large to make efficient consultation possible, their compilers began to arrange the contents either alphabetically (at first only according to the first letter of every word) or thematically. It is at that point that we start talking of the first dictionaries. Gradually, in addition to dictionaries with Latin as the source language, bilingual dictionaries appeared in Europe whose source language was one actually spoken (French, Spanish, and so on). To begin with, they comprised only one part, leading from L2 (a foreign language) to L1 (the intended users’ native language); the L1-L2 (native-foreign) part was always a later development. Unless indicated otherwise, our overview of the field of bilingual lexicography will be concerned with the “complete,” two-way dictionary (L2-L1 and L1-L2). *Email: arleta@wa.amu.edu.pl International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_6-1 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Page 1 of 11