ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary.

• Author: Branner, David Prager
• Position: Book review

ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Edited by JOHN DEFRANCIS. ABC Chinese Dictionary Series. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2003, 2009. Pp. 1464. $67.

The ABC Dictionary, containing some 200,000 entries in fine print on thin paper, is the work of the late John DeFrancis (1911-2009) and of decades of selfless encouragement by Victor Mair. Thanks to electronic editions from Wenlin and Murage and other licensees, not to mention closely related materials found on free websites of all sorts, the ABC Dictionary and its contents are now the most widely distributed American dictionary of Chinese.

Briefly, the best thing about this dictionary is the completeness of its coverage, a boon to those intermediate users who cannot handle an all-Chinese dictionary. For advanced users, however, it is somewhat marred by sloppiness in basic lexicographic work (perhaps due to its overreaching for coverage), by totally inadequate treatment of parts of speech, and by the alphabetic principle on which the dictionary is organized and for which it is named--a principle that is helpful in some respects but less so than the editors intended.

Treatment of standard translations: A substantial fraction of the material in Chinese-English dictionaries, consisting of ordinary verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and common (i.e., not proper) nouns, is more or less standard and varies little from one book to another. Proper nouns and the jargon from various technical and professional fields, too, are well on their way to being normalized in translation. The ABC Dictionary contains all that may be expected in regard to these words, and there is little to say beyond that where standard translations are concerned, little appears to be lacking. Much of this matter already belongs to common bilingual knowledge, so in that sense it is not strictly original to the ABC Dictionary.

But a Chinese-English dictionary should provide a translation only when it is really useful. In many cases, a definition--which explains meaning and usage--is better than a simple English equivalent because it can be more precise. That is true even for ordinary lexicon. A large part of the ordinary lexicon in the ABC Dictionary is rendered in translation rather than being defined, and in places that must be accounted a weakness.

As an illustration, virtually all Chinese-English dictionaries render the transitive verb peifu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as 'to admire; to be impressed', as does the ABC Dictionary. But as clear as this translation is, we might be better off with a definition. Consider that where English 'admire' indicates a state of esteem or approval, peifu implies that the object has at some point made an impression on the subject. Rather than equating peifu directly with 'admire', we might better define it as 'to be impressed with someone or with someone's qualities'. Moreover, peifu is sometimes used with considerable irony, transitively or intransitively, just as when we say in English, "I'm impressed,'" even though we may be no such thing. 'Admire' is not easily turned to that ironic usage; it is no better than a rough rendering of peifu.

As another example, the verb-object compound tiaoqing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is translated 'flirt' here. But the two words differ in scope and collocation. English 'flirt' can involve dallying with an idea or activity, whereas tiaoqing cannot. Tiaoqing, on the other hand, can describe the affectionate teasing that takes place between lovers in a long-running romance or between a husband and wife, domains outside the scope of 'flirt', since to flirt is normally to express or feign casual amorous interest. A...