[afrilex] Re: [asialex] Re: [DSNA] FW: Macmillan's recent announcement
- From: Jim Ronald <jmronald@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: slandau1755@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2012 06:52:15 +0900
Thanks for this news, Michael - both sad and liberating! As you mentioned,
for a 19-year-old Korean a paper dictionary is almost a museum piece
already. Even five years ago, I remember taking a set of paper dictionaries
to my class in Japan, and one student picking up one and nostagically
leafing through it, saying, "Ah, this brings back memories!"
As you know, the technological advances of handheld electronic
dictionaries, in Japan and elsewhere, have meant that users have resources
in their hand that before could only be dreamed of. For one thing, enough
dictionaries and other reference works to fill a couple of large suitcases
- with various jump, hyperjump, superjump facilities for flitting from one
entry to another, from one dictionary to another. Even to fill the screen
with concordance-type example sentences, or even to do the same with a
smallish corpus. Added to this are sound, highlighting and note-taking
capabilities, even graded readers... In many ways, a perfect language
learning resource - if it were used for all it is worth.
But this world of the handheld electronic dictionary, too, is fading fast.
After all, especially in times of recession, only the more dedicated
students would choose to shell out 300-400 dollars for one of these when
they can get a simple translation equivalent on their smartphone for
nothing. And without educating about what is in these dictionaries and how
to use them, and how to learn vocabulary rather than just look up a
translation for that moment's need, this simple bilingual dictionary on
their phone may seem to meet most of their needs.
There is hope with the growing presence of tablets in classrooms - at least
the screen is larger than the one on a phone - but the main challenge
remains not to make ever better dictionaries, whether liberated from paper
or not, but to make ever better-informed and motivated users of these
dictionaries. I remember twenty years ago one towering figure in the world
of corpus lexicography when asked about how language learners could use
these resources responding that it's not our business. I've wondered about
that ever since.
All the best,
Jim Ronald
Hiroshima Shudo University
On 7 November 2012 03:07, Sidney Landau <slandau1755@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There is no question that digitization in dictionaries describes the
> future, but the question I have is this: Though electronic storage allows,
> as we are endlessly reminded, continuous updating, what is the financial
> incentive of dictionary publishers to fund such updating continuously in a
> robust way? In print, the incentive was selling a new edition of thousands
> of books. So I remain a bit skeptical that the new world of electronic
> dictionaries will, in the end, result in better dictionaries.
>
> Sidney Landau
> On Nov 6, 2012, at 11:07 AM, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver wrote:
>
>
>
> 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
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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--
Jim Ronald (Professor, English Linguistics)
Deputy Director, International Affairs Center
Hiroshima Shudo University,
1-1-1 Ozuka-Higashi, Asaminami-ku,
Hiroshima 731-3195
Tel: 082-830-1174 (Shudo), 082-222-4445 (home)
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