I’m in the middle of (very painfully – it’s been a while) attempting to compose a letter in German. I’ve had to refer to a bilingual dictionary several times over the course of the process; oddly enough, it turns out that the dictionary doesn’t list the words for either English or German (in either language). Admittedly, those words occur in various titles in the dictionary, and one would hope that somebody using the dictionary already know them, but it still seems like a strange omission…
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Did you know that the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary? :-)
OK, I had to look. My trusty Langenscheidts Englisch-Deutsch Taschenwörterbuch does indeed have entries for “English” and “German” in the English half, and “englisch” and “deutsch” in the German half. The entries are quite useful, as they contain information beyond the obvious single-word translations. For example, the entry for “English” contains translations for idioms such as “in plain English” and “The Queen’s English.”
Yeah, it’s weird that your dictionary doesn’t have these entries.
1/17/2007 @ 8:25 pm
Admittedly, it’s not the largest dictionary in the world – it’s an old “Collins Pocket German Dictionary”. But it’s not small, either: you’d have to have pretty big pockets for the dictionary to fit in it (a good choice to throw in a backpack), and it has 46,000 words. So I’m surprised at their choice to leave them out, though I’m not convinced they were wrong to do so.
1/17/2007 @ 8:58 pm