[afrilex] Re: [Ishll] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement

Clara Molina <clara.molina@xxxxxx> · Tue, 6 Nov 2012 17:54:31 +0100

Sorry. Complete message now. As I said, this is so interesting! As someone who 
ended up trapped in the subway storage terminal in Saint Petersburgh a few 
years back (I was "reading" a (print) dictionary, lost track of time and had a 
hell of a time trying to convince them I was not of the dangerous sort...) I do 
understand what some of you are saying - mostly in emotional terms, which I 
guess we all understand as something "our own". At the same time, however, I 
feel there are more advantages to electronic and online dictionaries than the 
other way round. For two reasons, basically. One is that the move seems 
promising in the long quest for making lexicology and lexicography meet at long 
last. Another one is that today, while in class with a set of undergrads in a 
course on semantics, no one claimed to use anything else than online 
dictionaries (not even those who were not that happy with corpora and prototype 
theory when applied to the art and craft of dictionary making). Later on this 
morning I took another group of students to work hands on with the printed 
version of the OED. They loved the experience, were shocked when I told them 
the schedule for a thorough revised version to be out... and they asked how 
they could access (and contribute to!!!) the online version (could not be 
bothered with the impressive paper one). I guess this is how things are 
nowadays, and as I said, I don't regret it. It may finally pave the way for 
joining semasiology and onomasiology, synchrony and diachrony, extensional and 
intensional approaches... I feel like this is good news, even if challenging. 
Best. Clara Molina. 

El 06/11/2012, a las 17:07, "Gilles-Maurice de Schryver" 
<gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx> escribiÃ:

> To round off this thread, from Michael Rundell ...
>  
> From: Michael Rundell [mailto:michael.rundell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
> Michael Rundell
> Sent: dinsdag 6 november 2012 16:32
> To: euralex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: braasch@xxxxxxxxx; Simon Krek Gmail; Gilles-Maurice de Schryver; Bullon, 
> Stephen
> Subject: Macmillan's recent announcement
>  
> I thought it was time I waded into this debate. Thanks to everyone who has 
> contributed so many interesting and pertinent points. Much of what I have to 
> say on the subject has already been said more eloquently by people like 
> Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Simon Krek, and Anna Braasch, and my colleague 
> Stephen Bullon, but i'll put my two cents in anyway.
>  
> I think the arguments against abandoning print fall into two main categories, 
> practical and cultural/emotional.
>  
> The practical argument is that not everyone in the world enjoys good (or even 
> any) web connectivity. True (though becoming less true all the time). As any 
> publisher would, Macmillan took soundings from its sales people worldwide to 
> gauge future demand for print dictionaries (which of course varies wildly 
> from place to place). The current, final print run takes account of these 
> forecasts, and means we'll be able to satisfy that demand for some time to 
> come. Another model (which we have already applied in a few cases) is that a 
> local publishing partner can produce locally-printed versions of our 
> dictionaries under licence: an elegant and efficient approach for which there 
> may continue to be some demand over the next few years. But the process of 
> digitization is unstoppable - surely we all believe that? -  and we see these 
> measures as contingencies, to respond to a transitional situation. (An aside: 
> I seem to remember Sarah Ogilvie, in a plenary on endangered languages at 
> Euralex 2010, mentioning that in remote areas of Western Australia, 
> aboriginal people took advantage of the satellite technology installed by 
> mining companies there, and all had mobile phones with bilingual dictionaries 
> on them. So even thousands of miles from big cities, digital dictionaries are 
> by no means 'exotic'.)
>  
> This doesn't mean paper dictionaries will disappear any time soon: rather 
> that, like vinyl LPs (as we used to call them) they will be more of a niche. 
> There are many languages in the world that haven't yet benefited from the 
> last big lexicographic revolution - the 'corpus revolution' that began in the 
> 1980s - and publishers like Ilan Kernerman have provided excellent resources 
> for what we (reluctantly) refer to as 'smaller' languages. But Macmillan 
> produces dictionaries of English, and that most definitely is not a niche.
>  
> The second argument, roughly, is that we all like delving into physical 
> books, and printed dictionaries offer serendipitous discoveries as we idly 
> browse them. Well, up to a point. But as Anna put it, 'most people are not 
> lexicographers or lovers of words, for them a dictionary is just a tool'. The 
> primary market for Macmillan's pedagogical dictionaries consists either of 
> learners of English or people whose first language isn't English but who need 
> to use English in their professional or academic lives (an enormous group). 
> This cohort is predominantly young, and many are digital natives. The odds of 
> a 19-year-old Korean undergraduate taking a paper dictionary down from a 
> shelf in order to resolve a reference query are, like it or not, vanishingly 
> long, and getting longer. Of course, I too appreciate the joys of browsing a 
> dictionary, but then I am (a) in my sixties and (b) a lexicographer.
>  
> Besides, as Simon noted, there are plenty of browsing opportunities in 
> electronic reference materials. In Macmillan's online dictionary you can (a) 
> click on any word in a definition or example sentence and go straight to the 
> entry for that word; (b) click on the 'T' thesaurus button at any word, 
> phrase or word sense and have access to relevant thesaurus data; (c) scroll 
> down the pane to the right of the entry showing 'Related definitions' (thus 
> at the noun 'box' you could also, instantly, look up entries such as box in, 
> inbox, box room, box someone's ears, or think outside the box).
>  
> There are winners and losers, upsides and downsides, whenever things change. 
> But do we want to be like those people who wrote angry letters to the Times 
> when motorized transport first came to London at the beginning of the last 
> century, asking about the future employment prospects for people who made 
> their living by clearing the horse manure from the streets (I am not making 
> this up). As far as Macmillan is concerned, better to embrace a future that 
> will come anyway, than to hang grimly on to a way of doing things whose time 
> is passing. And the advantages of digital over paper are so great, and the 
> opportunities this medium offers are only beginning to be exploited.
>  
> And by the way, how would today's exchange of views have worked if we'd all 
> stuck to quill pens and the postal service?
>  
> Michael Rundell
> Editor-in-Chief
> Macmillan Dictionaries
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[afrilex] Re: [Ishll] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement

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