Category: Post 11: Evaluación de un diccionario

Diccionario de Dificultades del Ingles

-Alfonso Torrents dels Prats

Publisher: Editorial Juventud

1) This dictionary was published in 1976, and even though it was published a while ago, I do not think it is outdated and this is because many of the terms are still used today.  It’s publisher “Editorial Juventud,” is pretty reputable and has been around since 1923.  They specialize in books for children and teenagers, and interestingly enough, the first book they ever published was Peter Pan.

2) This dictionary would be most useful for translating scholarly articles/journals, and more advanced writing and that is because the terms are much more complex, they are not your everyday words.  For instance, this dictionary includes words such as depreciation, subsidize, versatility, vigour and quite frankly some words I have never came across before.

3) In my opinion, one of the biggest problems we have encountered through this course is knowing whether we are using the right translation in the right context.  Many times in English we use one single word in many different contexts, but translating it to Spanish you many have a few different ways of using that same word.  For example, I looked up the word “develop” and found 32 different definitions, with each translation explained in depth as to which context it can be used in, and for some words, the definitions took up more than three pages.

4) I do think this dictionary can be very useful and that is because sometimes learning a new language can be very difficult, let alone learning the more complex words.  It also cuts straight to the chase and does not involve smaller, everyday words that you may already know the meaning to.  In addition to that, it really goes in depth to give you all the possible meanings.

Preguntas para ser evaluadas:

Que tan autoritario es el diccionario?

1)     Es este diccionario “Dictionary of political science and international relations” by Kenneth Allen Hornak, Lexicographer. El publicista tiene un un estilo medio autoritario por la forma en que traduce y aparte de que no solo traduce palabra por palabra sino en oraciones y parrafos.

El publicista tiene una reputacion muy buena segun mi busqueda. El diccionario solo esta escrito por el y fue publicado en Julio del 2003 en Pensilvania. Este diccionario esta disponible en todas formas, electronica, en papel, y entre otros. Tambien puede ser distribuido internacionalmente, regionalmente y nationalmente.

1)     Este diccionario es usado para traducir constituciones, casos en la corte y cualquier estado politico. Por ejemplo: ability-to-pay tax system el sistema tributario según la capacidad de pago. Aqui vemos que no traduce palabra por palabra sino mas en frases.

2)     Cualquier traductor puede usar este diccionario como referencia. Por ejemplo: un abogado, un juez, o algun politico.

3)     1. Acquisition of nuclear weapons adquisición de armas nucleares. Aqui vemos que esta traducido perfectamente y no hay otra manera diferente de traducir. 2. act of state acto de gobierno. Aqui podemos ver que tambien puede ser traducido como “ acto del estado” solo hay que saber como y para que es usado especificamente. 3. Actively engaged in politics implicado activamente en la política. En esta podemos ver que es especificamente para politica, es un idioma mas avanzado y palabras claras solo usadas en la politica. Con esto dejo dicho que es bien claro y coherente. La facilidad de las palabras hace de este diccionario sea facil. Aunque no seas un politico u abogado es facil de entender.

En el Diccionario de términos contables, inglés-español y español- inglés = Dictionary of Accounting terms English- Spanish and Spanish- English escrito por Joaquín Blanes en México y publicado por la compañía editorial Continental S.A, una compañía muy reconocida no solo en México sino también en varios países de América y en España, ha distribuido este libro a más de 20 países. La versión a evaluar es la última por Continental S.A en 1972, pero, cabe recalcar que este diccionario ha sido editado y actualizado por su autor y ha sido distribuido por diferentes casas editoriales, siendo la más actual en el 2012 por la casa editorial Grupo Patria. Este diccionario está disponible solo de forma imprenta.

Como futura Contadora, aprecio mucho el esfuerzo puesto es este diccionario, y lo recomendaría a personas que de habla inglés y español que quieran leer o escribir algún reporte financiero. Es sencillo de manejar, separado en dos secciones, comenzando por la traducción de inglés a español y luego de español a inglés. Además, aunque este diccionario es específicamente para traducir algún término contable y no dar su definición, cuenta con esporádicas definiciones cortas en algunas palabras.

Al buscar las palabras a traducir encontré el termino contable “Caja” y “Caja Chica” cuya traducción en inglés es “Cash” y “Petty Cash” respectivamente. Un problema que encontré fue con la frase “Giros Bancarios”, el diccionario dice que la traducción adecuada es “Bank Drafts” y aunque esta en lo correcto, google, y el diccionario en línea de términos contables nos indica que es más común “Banker’s bills”.

En general me parece un diccionario completo que cumple su función pero carece de actualización no solo en su ano de edición (1972) sino en su presentación ya que solo se lo encuentra de forma impresa y en las universidades de NY o la librería Publica y vivimos en un siglo en el que todo se encuentra a la velocidad de un clic, y el tiempo que tardamos en buscar el libro y luego la palabra, es tiempo que nos serviría para buscar la palabra en internet y terminar el trabajo e incluso entregarlo! Además, aunque las palabras no cambiaran su significado con el pasar del tiempo, el idioma contable evoluciona, esto quiere decir que hoy en día hay términos contables que no existían en 1972, por lo tanto, el diccionario de Blanes no nos ayudaría.

Aun así lo recomendaría a personas de habla ingles y espanol que les interesa el área contable, pero enfatizaría que consigan la versión más actual.

Diccionario Español de Sinónimos y Antónimos

 1) Diccionario Espanol de Sinónimos y Antónimos was published by Aguilar in 1985. Aguilar is a very ‘reputable’ publisher as there are at least 20 works published under that name ranging from 1985 thru 2001 all of which are first editions. https://openlibrary.org/search?author_key=OL2815065A&publisher_facet=Aguilar This edition was written by the author Federico Carlos Sainz De Robles in Madrid, Spain and It is the 8th edition. It is only available in print format, but it is distributed internationally and readily available to order on global websites such as Amazon and eBay.Based on the year of publishing this edition, this work is not currently cited on a wide scale.

2) This dictionary is ideal for writing blogs, school research papers or articles such as newspapers and magazine. It would help the writer to make his/her writing a lot more vivid by finding lively synonyms for the words in their sentences.

3) Compared to other source such as wordrefercence.com and buscapalabra.com the results of searching for synonyms words are almost similar, only the dictionary shows fewer results since it is not modern and updated.

4) The dictionary is very simple to use, all the words are listed in alphabetical order and it’s very easy to search. At first the synonymous are listed right under the main words. However, searching for antonyms words become more challenging, especially for a non-native Spanish speaker. A comparison of synonyms among different sources such as http://www.diccionariodeantonimos.com/feo.html and http://quizlet.com/15296110/lista-de-antonimos-flash-cards/ was made to match the antonyms the dictionary offers. As a result, none of the websites’ antonyms were on the dictionary, and was difficult to distinguish the antonyms offered by the dictionary.

Even though was published nearly 20 years ago, its content of synonyms is still relevant and it is still worth of taking into consideration, except for the antonyms.

Diccionario Botánico De Nombres Vulgares Cubanos

El Diccionario Botánico de Nombres Vulgares Cubanos fue escrito por el Dr. Juan Tomas Roig y Mesa. Tiene tres ediciones la primera edición fue en 1928, la segunda edición, ampliada y corregida, 1963, tercera edición ampliada y corregida fue en 1965. Al pasar de los años se han hecho reimpresiones de las ediciones con el fin de corregir errores u omisiones, como también para agregar  nuevos epígrafes o artículos correspondientes a otros tantos nombres vulgares la mayoría de ellos tomadas de distintos autores; algunos de ellos corresponden a especies nuevas para la ciencia.

La edición que encontré en la biblioteca es la tercera edición que fue publicada por iniciación del Instituto Nacional de  Reforma Agraria, (INRA), teniendo en cuenta el haberse agotado la edición anterior y, además, por el deseo del Gobierno Revolucionario de hacer llegar al campesino cubano a las granjas y cooperativas agrícolas, asi como a los estudiosos de esa materia, una fuente de información sobre la flora y cultivos económicos cubanos.

La casa editorial que publico la tercera edición  fue la prestigiosa Editorial Científico- Técnica, la Habana es una de las editoriales más gustadas y buscadas por los lectores. Las publicaciones de la editorial Científico-Técnica están relacionadas con las ciencias aplicadas, técnicas, naturales y biológicas, entre otras. También, La editorial se destaca por su participación en la Feria Internacional del Libro, tradicionalmente está representada con títulos de una amplia y variada diversidad temática, que constituyen novedades de lectura y estudio para los especialistas que acuden en su búsqueda. Indudablemente el amplio panorama de su producción que ofrece esta editorial en la Feria Internacional del Libro constituye un buen motivo para que los lectores la sigan teniendo entre los sellos preferidos de Cuba.

El diccionario se puede encontrar  únicamente en forma impresa. También fue distribuido nacional e internacional, especialmente en las universidades, por ejemplo en la universidad de Texas, Michigan, y Baruch están disponibles en las bibliotecas.

La primera parte del diccionario explica la agrupación de las plantas, por ejemplo plantas frutales, plantas que son para animales, medicina etc. Es una buena introducción para entender mejor la explicación de la definición de cada una de ellas, pero es muy fácil de usar dado que una persona que no tenga conocimiento de flora o relación con ciencias puede captar fácilmente la asociación. Este diccionario seria una buena fuente de utilidad para un traductor que este trabajando con texto relacionados con ciencias naturales, flora, botánica, agronomía y biología.

A continuación tomare palabras junto con sus definiciones para que tengan una idea de cómo la información es presentada:

COL DE BRUSELAS: Variedad de col poco cultivada en Cuba, Brassica oleraces L., var.gemnifera Zenker. Esta col envés de formar un gran repollo como la col común produce numerosos botones o pequeñas cabezuelas de una o dos pulgadas de diámetro, insertos a lo largo y alto del tallo.……………tienen un saber parecido al de la col.

Corona de Novia: Cactácea cultivada, de flores olorosas, blancas, en corimbos; el fruto una baya amarilla , acida. Es el Peireskia aculeata Mill. V. GROSELLERO DE LA FLORIDA, GUINDA Y TOMATE AMERICANO.

Otras palabras que puedo mencionar son CORONEL, CORONILLA, JIA , bueno en fin son muchas palabra que pueden parecer raras para otros pero son muy propias de la flora cubana.

Si se busca estas palabras en otros diccionarios o internet el significado es totalmente diferente.

Diccionario-guía de traducción: Español-Inglés, Inglés-Español

Brian Mott & Marta Mateo

1)      How authoritative is this dictionary?

Sold in 24 countries

Distributed by over 17 online businesses including Amazon and Google

Over 90,000 copies printed in their first volume

A)    Written by one person or many people?

Brian Mott – Professor at the University of Barcelona

Marta Mateo – Professor at the University of Oviedo

B)     How reputable is this publisher?

The University of Barcelona is a government and academia real Española certified/endorsed educational institution that educates over 1500 students in the language and liberal arts department each semester.

C)    When was it published?  2009 by The University of Barcelona

D)    What formats is it available? Print version only

E)     How widely is it distributed? Internationally by online business powerhouses such as Amazon and Google.

Is it widely cited?

Yes, references are attributed to Corpus del Español, Cobuild Concordance & Collocations, several data bases (based-in Spain used by la academia real Española), and Corpus Linguistico.

2)      List at least three projects for which a translator would consult this dictionary.

A) Writing books for educational purposes

B) Translating “common people” articles

C) Verifying punctuation and accurate references for synonyms, metaphors, sexist language, grammatical topics, and hyponymy.

3)      The goal/objective of this dictionary was to rectify any previous deficiencies, clarify explanations, and provide more authentic examples of usage and above all, even up the two parts Spanish-English and English-Spanish sections which were uneven in the previous edition.

• Written from the point of view of the native English speaker translating in to Spanish.
• The dictionary matches the three example words chosen and goes beyond the standard translation by providing additional reference words.
• Contemporary usage and colloquialism is included in this dictionary compared to the standard Spanish-English dictionary.
• Supplementary reference manual, to confront the present problems that recur most frequently when the native speaker of Spanish or English attempts to render text in the target language.

4)      Entries are grammatical and lexical

• Cover areas such as passive voice, word order, and al major word classes (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, articles, and prepositions), equivalents of the plethora of Modern Spanish words ending in –ismo, and accurately in another language.
• Provide suggested translations for “Fuzzy” areas of lexis that cannot be satisfactorily dealt with standard Spanish-English dictionaries
• Super ordination and hyponymy, synonyms, ambiguity, and sexist language classification.
• Grammatical topics are presented not only through traditional word classes, but also through functional concepts, such as advice and recommendation, permission and obligation.

5)      Additional Information

• Example sentences are longer than the standard dictionary to provide more contexts and include other useful words and phrases with their translations apart from the headword.
• Examples are culled from newspapers and books to reflect authentic usage rather than artificial sentences

Diccionario comercial español-inglés, inglés español: El secretario; compilación al día de todos los términos y expresiones para la correspondencia comercial, española-inglesa, inglesa-española / por Alejandro Frías – Sucre Giraud

This commercial (business)  dictionary in my evaluation has shown to be very limited and unreliable in its presentation at the same time defining many words that are in an antiquated way that is out of date. This specific version was copyrighted in 1940 and published in 1977 (for this version, edition 5.807).

The dictionary is also available in the editions which were printed in the years of 1949, 1981, 1984, 1985, and 1990. It is available in Google Boooks online in scanned versions for the versions of 1990, 1981, and 1940.

Even five versions of this book exist, this is a small number since the dictionary has was first published in 1940. It has not been updated since 1990 and is not even listed any longer in the publishers website, evident that it is no longer being produced for circulation in the market. They are found in a very limited quantity, usually with a single book in stock in various different sites that show up on Google very randomly, many out of stock. The book can be found for sale at around $4.00 per book. It has been found in three different countries according to my searches; The United States, Canada, and Spain – all of them in the same limited quantity, most of them used of course, some claim to have it in new condition.

The publisher was founded in 1923 in Barcelona Spain where it is still located to this day. Its website contains many books in the category of dictionaries, classics, children’s books, biographies, history, gastronomy and others. Even though that is a wide variety of books in its website, the website is poor, as it looks lke it was cheaply made and in more than 90 years of existence, it would be expected that there would be more publications then just these.  The website looks poor in its presentation as seen here http://www.editorialjuventud.es/

The author “Alejandro Frías – Sucre Giraud” is almost completely unknown and shows up as only having publish this one dictionary and one other book which the title can be found even more randomly than the dictionary, however there is not even a description of what the book is about.

Reviews for this publisher were hard to find. This one was the only one possible to be obtained … http://www.statscrop.com/www/editorialjuventud.es, which gives a rating of #1,172,321 in the world, which does not mean much since the review site is also poor and does not explain what guidelines it follows in making this assessment – it only states that a smaller number means high volume of visits which tells me nothing if it does not state how many sites were evaluated. The website is  worth $1,498 and its revenue is of $4.00 per day. The publisher does not even have a Wikipedia page. Its Facebook page has only 2, 482 likes. It is cited very few times. This is disappointing in relation to the fact that it has 347,000 results on Google search, but they repeat themselves many times.

This dictionary could have been used in three following instances if it was reliable in accordance with its field ( or at least the field that it was initially intended to address):

1. A translator in the New York stock exchange may want to send technical information in a letter about stocks and bonds and inform a person in Spanish, such as in the stock market of Spain about the profit that was made in capital in relation to these specific stocks.
2. A person may want to know commercial/ business terms in order to refer to a colleague who will be traveling from the United States to Spain and that has been assigned to work in a Real Estate company and explain what his qualifications are in this area.

3. A scholar might be in need to translate his essay in Economics and may need some technical terms that address economic concepts.

However, as already mentioned, none of these cases above may be done correctly since the dictionary is of very poor quality and does not perform according to what its intended purpose should be. This dictionary is old, contains definitions that are outdated such as describing the word “value” and its use in context of “value in cash” as “pago en metálica” which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and has definitions of simple words such as the word “pencil” which are irrelevant and unnecessary to be in a technical dictionary, as the word is completely basic. In addition the dictionary is very small, for example for the translation of the words with the letter “v” from English to Spanish there is only a page and a half of definitions and the book is quite small (4″ by 9″ or so).

This dictionary was easy to retrieve and locate at Baruch College, however as it is seen in the search it is not easily found everywhere and may be hard to obtain and take long times to ship if found as seen in the websites that came up when doing a Google search.

The Diccionario de Estadisticas by E. Morice was originally published in 1974 by Compania Editoral Continental which is an international publishing house based in Spain with subsidiaries in many Latin American countries. As an international brand, the publishers have gained global recognition with their works especially within the Hispanic populations.

The text itself is a reputable source as in was made in association with the Societe de Stastistique de Paris, a mathematical society first established in 1802. It was originally a french statistics manual but was translated to spanish and distributed as such. The book is only available in print and there have yet to be any updated versions since the 1974 release.

This volume has a wide array of uses for students and professionals alike. It covers the basic statistical terminology needed for analysis but also discusses the moral theoretical implications of advanced statistical significance. It can therefore be used  by students in introductory statistics class or those enrolled in a research methodology course and as use for researchers and experimenters alike as it provides background and history on the analysis and methods.  In terms of translations, it would most likely be useful for someone who is attempting to translate a peer edited journal that includes empirical results.

As mentioned, the dictionary serves as more than that, it provides the historical, theoretical and mathematical roots for analysis and results. It’s translation and explanations are consistent with our modern day understanding of the terms and therefore the text shows signs of longevity.

El diccionario de la lengua española es parte del diccionario dela Real Academia. La Real Academia es una institución que fue creada hace mas de trecientos años en el 1713. Esta fue una iniciativa de Juan Manuel Fernandez Pacheco quien fue el primero de veintinueve directores de la Real Academia.

La Real Academia esta actualmente instalada en Madrid, España. El objetivo fundamental de la Academia es “velar por que la lengua española, en su continua adaptación a las necesidades de los hablantes, no quiebre su esencial unidad.”

El diccionario de la lengua española es solo uno de varios diccionarios que existen en la institución de la Real Academia. Tambien existen el Diccionario panhispanico de dudas, Diccionario esencial y nuevo diccionario histórico. En el sitio de la Real Academia tambien tienen diccionarios anteriores disponibles.

El diccionario de la lengua española nació en el año 1780.  Desde entonces se han publicado ventidós ediciones. La más reciente fue publocada en el año 2001.

Este es un diccionario que esta disponible electronicamente y tambien esta disponible impreso.

El diccionario de la lengua española puede ser usado por cualquier persona que habla español o que esta trabajando con la lengua española. De hecho lo usamos en clase. La reputacion de este diccionario es muy buena. Este diccionario esta solamente en español. No es un diccionario bilingüe.

Es un diccionario para uso general, de palabras generales mas no para cosaa especificas como leyes o vocabulario scientifico.

Laura Triana