The article is an analysis of labels used in eighteen general Polish-French and French-Polish dictionaries that have been published over the last forty years. The author wants to find out whether the analysed dictionaries have the same labels and whether the labels are defined, which would make it possible to regard them as terms. The inventory of labels, compiled on the basis of information contained in the introductions to the dictionaries and on the basis of lists of abbreviations, is divided into seven thematic groups. The author focuses in particular on the chronological, geographical, stylistic and expressive labels. Within each of these groups the Polish labels are confronted with the Polish lexicographic practice and the French labels – with the French practice. Finally both lists – Polish and French – are compared in terms of equivalence. The analysis shows that the bilingual dictionaries examined by the author usually do not explain the rules of labelling words and do not define precisely the meanings of labels used, though some of the modern monolingual dictionaries could be regarded as positive examples in this respect. In addition, authors of bilingual dictionaries seem to be limited in their use of the latest methodological proposals presented in the extensive literature on the subject. Consequently, the inventory of Polish terms used as labels in bilingual dictionaries only partially corresponds to the list of labels used nowadays in Polish language dictionaries.
The first part of the article deals with the function of the examples in bilingual dictionaries, compared to their function in monolingual ones. First, it is argued that examples in an active bilingual dictionary should principally exemplify the use of the headword’s translation equivalents rather than the headword itself, as it is in the case of monolingual dictionaries. Then a survey is made dealing with examples selected from all simple preposition entries in a recent Polish-French dictionary, taking into consideration both the structure and the function of these examples. The general conclusion is that in the investigated entries exemplifi cation fails seriously enough to make it impossible for users to choose the appropriate equivalent of a particular preposition.
The author analyses fragments of entries devoted to the preposition za in its spatial use found in fourteen contemporary Polish-French general dictionaries of different sizes. A general conclusion from the analysis is that, due to significant gaps in the inventory of equivalents and in exemplification, none of the fragments dealing with za makes it possible for native speakers of Polish to select the correct French equivalent of the preposition za in its spatial meaning. That is why the author presents his own proposal of a relevant entry dealing with za prepared with Polish language users in mind.
The paper analyses fragments of entries devoted to the preposition za in its temporal use found in sixteen contemporary Polish-French general dictionaries of different sizes. A general conclusion from the analysis is that, due both to inappropriate construction of these entries and to significant gaps in the inventory of equivalents and in exemplification, none of the fragments dealing with za makes it possible for native speakers of Polish to select the correct French equivalent of the preposition za in its temporal meaning.
The paper deals with Polish phraseological units containing the toponymic name Francja (‘France’) and the adjective francuski (‘French’), derived from the ethnic name Francuz (‘Frenchman’), found in twenty dictionaries of modern and ancient Polish. The corpus includes about fifty general and specialised collocations and idioms, which are basically described from the perspective of their lexicographic treatment. Besides, some of those units belong to thematic fields such as cooking, fashion or love, and present French people as delicate and elegant, which coincides with their contemporary perception in Poland.
The paper deals with the lists of proper names found in 22 Polish-French and/or French-Polish dictionaries out of the 45 dictionaries investigated, including dictionaries of different sizes published over the last 150 years. The lists most often include geographical names, gentilics and first names. A popular practice is to include certain items in the main body of the dictionary and to list other items in appendices; sometimes, these two sets of proper names overlap, which is incoherent. In addition to the quite evident information on spelling, the analysed lists may provide phonetic, grammatical, stylistic or encyclopedic data. However, the accumulation of such information, very valuable for users, transforms the lists into a succession of entries. That is why, instead of striving for originality by putting together lists of such exotic terms as Zodiac signs or celestial bodies, it would be better to incorporate proper names into the macrostructure.
The article focuses on the French summaries of BA & MA theses written by students of French philology at the University of Wrocław between 2015 and 2020. The objective is to determine to what extent the linguistic, discursive and intellectual dimensions of this short academic text constitute, for the students, a source of challenges during the writing process. The general conclusion is that very often the summary of a diploma thesis looks like a report detailing the activities of the student, instead of summarizing an intellectual trajectory and informing of the results of the research.
In this study, we focus our attention on the lexical notes in Polish-French bilingual dictionaries which are supposed to provide additional information on the semantics of the items and, therefore, on their translation into the target language. After having identified three bilingual dictionaries containing such lexical notes (placed in boxes or frames within the structure of the book), we classify their content into 15 categories. More than half of them are based on semantic relations between lexical units, including false friends, onomasiological fields, and (para)synonyms. Fifty-five boxes out of 215 deal with formal relations, most often paronymy. The numerically least important group is made up of boxes containing different usage advice. We identify also some methodological errors in the conception of the boxes (mostly due to the irrelevance of the content for the target audience).
This paper is made in continuation of the article of Fabrice Marsac, Witold Ucherek and Magdalena Dańko “De l’infinitive de perception dans la pratique traductologique” (Studia Romanica Posnaniensia 46/1, 2019); both papers fall within the framework of the bilateral Polonium program “On the translation of French perception structures into Polish” (n° PPN/BIL/2018/1/00181), implemented and financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). In the present case, we intend to report on the content and progress of the part “multi-dimensional labelling” of this long-term French-Polish project. Therefore, we describe the formal encoding of structures, categories and functions of the items in the large multi-label corpus (French-Polish) we have been collecting since 2019.
The subject of the study are the infinitive subordinate clauses (ICP). These infinitive structures, introduced by a perception verb like voir (‘see’), regarder (‘watch’), entendre (‘hear’), écouter (‘listen’) and sentir (‘smell’), are composed of two complements: a noun phrase and a verb infinitive (j’entends les oiseaux chanter ‘I hear birds sing’). We are interested in ICP in a French-Polish traductological perspective. As this structure, so widespread in French, is not to be found in Polish, this Slavic language offers at least eight different ways of translating it (observed in the corpora), the most frequent of which turns out to be the jak P (‘as P’) structure (*słyszę ptaki śpiewać/śpiewać ptaki ‘I hear birds sing/I hear sing birds’; słyszę, jak ptaki śpiewają/śpiewają ptaki, literally ‘I hear as birds sing/sing birds’). Even though we regularly come across this linguistic phenomenon in our profession (we teach French to Polish bachelor students), there is one basic issue that intrigues us: how do the translators choose one of the eight available structures in their native language? Are their choices random, or lingustically constrained? To answer this thorny question, we have decided to adopt as a theoretical framework (adapting them to ICP) the research tools proposed by Professor Eugeniusz Ucherek (University of Wrocław, Poland, 1982), who originally constituted a method of contrastive French-Polish analysis of prepositions.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.