BILINGUAL ENGLISH/KOREAN DICTIONARIES
New Millennium Dong-A Prime English-Korean
Dictionary 4th Edition (DAPEK)
ELECTRONIC EDITION
(Assessed by Chunho Yang, a student in the postgraduate translation
and interpretation program, Macquarie University, 2006)
Features of the electronic dictionary investigated in this study
- Specifications
Dictionary
9 dictionaries installed
Display Size
264 x 129dots
Filter Search
Yes
Jump Function
Yes
Spellchecker
Yes
Calculator
Yes
Word Time
Yes
Battery
AAA x 2
Dimensions
136 (W) x 76(D) x 18(H) mm
Weight
150g (including batteries)
Flash Memory
256KB
Model: RD-6200
Manufactured year: 2000
(http://www.sharp-korea.co.k)
Introduction
This paper investigated a corpus of problematic lexemes from two combined
lists: one including words and phrases identified by former students as
problematic and another one compiled by students enrolled in the Researcch
Methods in translation and interpreting unit in the second semester of 2006.
Similarly to a group of former students, we were asked to make a list of words
and phrases whose meaning or concept in the texts given to was not clear
enough translate them into Korean. The texts used for this study were
selected from The Economist.
The number of the words collected from the two sources was 585. These
words were investigated to find out whether appropriate equivalents were
1
found in the entries of the DAPEK and whether entries found were useful in
solving translation problems identified in context.
Findings
Only 3 out of 586 words or phrases were not covered by the entries of the
DAPEK. Each of these words was the name of a company or a robot. That is,
the study indicates that the DAPEK supplies sufficient entries, except names
of certain entities, such as Cisco, Flextronix and Roomba.
Additionally, there were three phrases whose definitions were listed in the
DAPEK, but students experienced difficulties in comprehending the contexts
where those words were put. The definit