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guages; 3. encouraging the practice of publishing scientific literature
in widely known rather than little known languages; 4. using
internationally recognised words and symbols in preference to
others, or, going a stage further, promoting publication in an
easily-learned international auxiliary language.
4.1.2 The primary purpose of interlingual dictionaries is to
elucidate the vocabulary of foreign languages. Phrases rather
than individual words are the significant units in utilising language
to express thought, so dictionaries which merely lists words without
their context, in the arbitrary order determined by the alphabetical
spelling, are apt to foster the illusion that each word in a language
necessarily has an exact counterpart in other languages. As was
stated by a working party at the Royal Society Scientific Infor
mation Conference in 1948, the translation of scientific literature
should always be based on scientific principles of verifiable no-
menclatural equivalents, never on etymological speculation. Any
features a dictionary may possess which encourage the user to
assist in such verification by drawing upon his own technical
knowledge can be counted in its favour. Such features include the
citation of phrases to illustrate the use of terms in typical contexts
or the provision of sketches of the concepts named in the dictionary.
4.1.3 Convenience in consulting a dictionary depends very
much on the care, skill, and intelligence that have been applied
to the design of its typography, layout of its pages, and, in the
case of a dictionary connecting more than two languages, the
method of combining or cross-referencing them. A dictionary
connecting three languages such as English, French, and German,
may consist of a volume or part which is alphabetical in English
giving both French and German equivalents, another which is
alphabetical in French giving English and German equivalents,
and a third one which is alphabetical in German giving English
and French equivalents. Langford's Technical and Commercial
Dictionary' is of this type. It aims to provide the commercial
correspondent and technician with a key to current terminology
in the most important branches of trade and industry. From the
user's point of view, this is the most convenient method of arrange
ment. But when more than three languages are involved, printing
becomes very expensive as the entire contents have to be repeated a
number of times to connect each language with all of the others.
In this type of dictionary the number of words to be printed is
proportional to the square of the number of languages. Because of this
the alternative usually adopted in dictionaries connecting more
than three languages is to print the equivalent terms in parallel
columns. The sequence of terms can then be alphabetical in no
more than one language. Translating from the other languages
becomes a much slower process as the words have to be found in
an alphabetically arranged key, which indicates the page number
or item number where the word and its equivalent can be found.
