A Critical Analysis of Multilingual Dictionaries

Abstract

This article evaluates the lexicographic value of multilingual dictionaries. Dictionaries covering three or more languages spoken in South Africa are taken as a case in point. An attempt will be made to reflect on their merits and shortcomings as reference works and learning tools but the focus will be on presumed shortcomings in the macro and micro structures of such dictionaries with special attention to the lemmatisation of common words, quality of the dictionary articles and consistency in presentation.

Keywords

• multilingual dictionaries
• macro structure
• micro structure
• african languages
• thematic ordering
• alphabetic ordering