Principles of Selection of Neologisms for a Bilingual Dictionary (English-Chinese)

Principles of Selection of Neologisms for a Bilingual Dictionary (English-Chinese) Thomas B. I. Creamer¡Since the fall of 1993, Lu Gusun (Professor of English at Fudan University, Shanghai, China) and I have been working together to compile an English-Chinese dictionary of approximately 1 ,000 new English words for Chinese users. I collect words and citations, and Professor Lu drafts definitions in Chinese and translates the citations. The purpose of the dictionary is twofold: first, to document new words and new meanings in English since about 1990; and second, to give insights into modern American culture for the nonnative user. With this dual goal in mind, the principles of selection may be somewhat different from those of the typical dictionary of neologisms. Selection of headwords The main principle for the selection of headwords is that the lexical items should be general-language terms that appear in current English-language periodicals. American English is emphasized over British and other varieties of English because sources for those varieties are not readily available to us. During the early stages of the collection process the Washington Post and the Sunday New York Times were the primary sources for words and citations. A more ambitious reading program has been undertaken that includes the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and the New York Times (each of these being read two or three times a week), Time, Newsweek, U.S. News ir World Report , the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rolling Stone. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times (Washington edition) are also being perused. Selection of Neologisms for a Bilingual Dictionary103 Because of the amount of material being read and the time pressures of other full-time lexicographical work, I had to make some compromises in the reading plan. For the most part, articles filed from foreign locations, i.e, world news, are ignored to guard against collecting non-native uses of English. Stories dealing with sports are also skipped because of the often excessive use of clichés and the like. After Lu selects appropriate headwords, I search full-text CDROM newspapers at the Library of Congress for additional citations. The periodicals currently available are the Arizona Republic/Phoenix Gazette, the Dallas Morning News, the Portland Oregonian, and the Sacramento Bee. The primary reason for searching these "retro-citations " is not to find an earlier or first occurrence for a headword, but rather to survey current usage outside the mainstream East Coast press. Along with these resources, word-watch columns such as William Satire's "On Language," and John and Adele Algeo's "Among the New Words" are consulted, as are other dictionaries of neologisms, particularly The Oxford Dictionary of New Words by Sara Tulloch and the Algeos' Fifty Years Among the New Words. Finally, the compiler 's personal files and correspondence round out the source materials . The second principle of selection is that the word or definition being considered does not appear in The English-Chinese Dictionary, Unabridged, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Yiwen Publishing House, 1989-1991), hereafter ECD, the generally acknowledged standard resource in China for English. Lu was the editor-in-chief of this dictionary that contains more than 200,000 English headwords and has sold 100,000 copies in China, with other editions available in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This dictionary is a complete revision and expansion of A New EnglishChinese Dictionary (Shanghai: Renmin Publishing House, 1975) that sold over six million copies in China. This is not to imply that the dictionary being compiled is meant to be a supplement to The English -Chinese Dictionary. Rather, it will be used merely as a point of reference. Selection criteria With these two guiding principles in mind, the criteria of selection can be elaborated under the following broad headings. An entry will be included if: 1. It is a word "new" to the English language. This category 104Thomas B. I. Creamer includes those words such as cablecast, cyberspace, distance learning, edutainment, face time, global warming, NIMBY, omnisphere (homeless dome), UV (ultraviolet) index that have been coined in the last several years and usually do not appear in recent editions of monolingual dictionaries such as...