Idioms in the Arabic-English Dictionary

Abstract

Despite the considerable research carried out in the field of bilingual lexicography, several aspects of the Arabic-English dictionary targeting translators remain a largely uncharted area. One such area is “idioms” and their various manifestations in this type of dictionary. The aim of this paper was to examine three interrelated issues. First, it sought to determine if the bilingual dictionary (BD) covers this particular lexical phenomenon exhaustively and systematically in its source language component. Secondly, it examined canonical variation and its representation in the dictionary. Finally, the paper looked into the entry point of full idioms, truncated forms and canonical variants. The analysis demonstrated that a significantly large number of Arabic idioms are not listed, that the coverage of idioms lacks consistency, and that lemmatization is typically characterized by chaos and subjectivity..