The need for an electronic multilingual dictionary

The need for an electronic multilingual dictionaryThe paper analyses the issue of providing adequate equivalents in multilingual dictionaries. If equivalents are adequate, it means that: (1) the scope of meaning of one item is identical to its equivalent (cf. drive: drive a nail vs. drive a car); and (2) the collocations of the equivalents overlap. Two significant problems arise when searching for adequate equivalents: the lack of equivalents whose meanings are identical (narrower/wider meanings, partial overlap of meanings, more than equally good equivalent), and equivalents with homographs in a given language. Because such issues are difficult to resolve in a printed dictionary, we put forward some methods of addressing the problems in an electronic dictionary. The paper offers an example entry from such a dictionary, which presents a suggestion of a layout. We also took into consideration the potential problems which may appear if the entry is presented in this manner: first, one must set a limit for the description (a defined number of lexical units); second, one must avoid circularity, but at the same time also strive for an exhaustive description. Electronic dictionaries offer greater possibilities of presenting modern vocabulary and adding new classifiers (e.g. a classifier of politeness).