Bridge Dictionaries as Bridges Between Languages

Bridge dictionaries are a new sort of dictionary for learners of English. They are based on the monolingual Cobuild learners’ dictionaries, and they are partly translated—they contain translated definitions and translation equivalents. This paper shows the possible ways of exploiting Bridge dictionaries for creating new bilingual or multilingual dictionaries.

One possible way is to extract corresponding translation equivalents, edit them, and make a new printed dictionary. As both sides of such a dictionary were originally created as translations from English, the dictionary requires quite a lot of lexicographic work.

Another possibility is to create an electronic version of the dictionary “as is”. For this purpose, it is necessary to convert the dictionary first into SGML format and define its DTD. This format can then serve as a standard for future Bridge dictionaries and adding new language modules to existing dictionaries would be quite easy.