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

Clara Molina <clara.molina@xxxxxx> · Tue, 6 Nov 2012 17:25:09 +0100

Hi there. This is becoming aÃos interesting discussion. 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. At the same time, I feel there are more advabtages to 
eleztronic and online dictionaries 

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

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