Bilingual dictionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The paper contains a survey of the most interesting dictionaries combining English with French, German; Spanish, Italian, Dutch. Bilingual dictionaries compiled by English lexicographers in the nineteenth century were not of exceptional quality. Dictionaries combining English and a foreign language were often commissioned by foreign publishers specializing in lexicography, notably Teubner, Brockhaus and Langenscheidt in Berlin, and Garnier in Paris. More often still, British publishers had dictionaries produced abroad for their respective French, German, or Italian markets―products which were afterwards sold by those same English publishers in their hard covers, though they were not originally intended for English-speaking users. The situation for dictionaries of the major European languages was rather stagnant in the first part of the twentieth century. The radical shift for bilingual lexicography featuring English with a European language came about as a result of the great success of monolingual learners’ dictionaries and, with it, the possibility of access to electronic versions of those dictionaries. Their databases became the starting point of a new generation of bilingual dictionaries. In the beginning, British publishing houses sold the rights to process the lists of headwords and entries of their learners’ dictionaries, but then they decided to exploit the expertise accumulated when preparing large bilingual dictionaries―and began to work in co-edition with French, Spanish, and German publishers. Bilingual dictionaries in the electronic era serve both as a starting point and as a by-product of bi-and multilingual electronic databases, as well as products which with multimedia (audio and video) aspects of an entry will reach larger and younger audiences.