Han-Ying shuangjie Xinhua zidian (Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation) (review)

The old saw about reviewing a telephone directory ("lots of characters, but not much plot") has a certain pertinence when it comes to reviewing a Chinese dictionary, in particular a character dictionary like this. The Xinhua zidian has been a stalwart of generations of Chinese since it was first published in 1957. Over four decades it has gone through nine editions and more than one hundred printings. Its 380 million copies meant it could be found everywhere in China. The small, usually plastic-covered dictionary was also a boon to foreign students of the language. When I started learning Chinese in Beijing in 1974, there were no comprehensive Chinese-English dictionaries that used pinyin romanization. I made do with a photocopied version of a U.S. government translation of a Chinese-German pinyin dictionary, shipped to Beijing from Washington, D.C. through diplomatic channels and bound in bright red leatherette, for about a dollar in a Beijing bindery. It sat, letter-page size and four inches thick, on my desk for my two years' studying in the city. The other dictionary I relied on was the Xinhua zidian, but its Chinese definitions were a little beyond a beginning student.

Since those old days several highly useful Chinese-English dictionaries have transformed work in the language by English-speakers. Of the more portable of these, the Oxford double-usage dictionary has traveled China in the backpacks of students since it appeared in the late 1980s. John DeFrancis' astonishing ABC Chinese-English Dictionary has defied the tyranny of Chinese characters and, in its hand-friendly pocket edition, offers an exceptional number of instant definitions and translations for the harried researcher.

This new dictionary, launched with some fanfare in Beijing in June 2000, presents the entire contents of the 1998 revised edition of the Xinhua zidian with a full English translation of everything: definitions, introductions, notes, guides, and indexes. More than twice the bulk of the familiar plastic one, it represents a considerable effort on the part of the translators and editors. To encourage early understanding of individual characters, this will be an essential tool for students of the language. For a quick search for the pronunciation and meaning of a tricky character, the dictionary is well worth the price. For compound words, other dictionaries will be more rewarding, as relatively few compounds are included here.

As the editors note in their introduction (in Chinese and English), the dictionary will also appeal to Chinese learners of English. Here again, the limited range of compounds (in the original Chinese-Chinese dictionary) is likely to frustrate the learner. Perhaps the editors were too bound by their respect for the original plastic marvel. They lost an opportunity, for example, to indicate for students of Chinese which characters are most widely used. Not long after I bought this dictionary, I happened to find in a Beijing bookstore a small dictionary of the most commonly used two thousand characters and the next most common 1,500. For several weeks on a daily basis I laboriously made marks beside those characters in this Xinhua Dictionary, as an aid to further learning and more productive memorization.

Unfortunately the dictionary is marred by errors, probably attributable to the absence of a native English-speaker at points during the editing and production of this huge project. "Unburnt" bricks should be unfired, "moister" should be moisten (p. 560), "early pronounce" should be early pronunciation (also p. 560), "violance" and "magnificant" occur on one page (p. 723), "housecars" should be horsecarts (p. 265), and "tabooing the face" should be tattooing the face (p. 464). The 1998 original definition of pin (p. 506) does not include reference to its use to refer to television channels, so the editors do not mention it here, even though most foreign learners will come across this usage of the character more often than others. The definition of gan reads, somewhat startlingly, "courageous, have balls...