Equivalence at the Level of the Message: The Role of Co- and Context in a Bilingual Dictionary (Based on the Material from a Not Yet Published English-Slovene Dictionary)

Abstract

The article examines the treatment of absence of dictionary equivalents at word level in a decoding English-Slovene dictionary (ESD) which has not been published yet. The study focuses on the use of the hash sign, which implies no equivalence at word level. However, if the untranslatable SL lexical item is used in an example illustrating its use, it can be rendered in the TL, which means that equivalence is reached at the level of the entire message. The total number of hash signs used in the ESD is 92, but one and the same entry can contain more than one hash, which means that hash signs are found in 41 lemmata. Detailed results are presented by parts of speech of the lemmata: a numerical analysis is followed by an analysis of the content of the illustrative examples. The conclusion is that if equivalence cannot be achieved at word level but is possible at the level of the entire message, the problem can be resolved by including translated examples of use.