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Catch the Words  
  In 1850, a young Berliner on the Grand Tour of Europe all eyes and ears sketched and took notes on the many and varied impressions gained on his travels.

  17-year-old Gustav Langenscheidt, the scion of a solid middle-class family, recorded everything in his diary -- his fascination with foreign customs and practices as well as his great disappointment.

  "It is a truly mortifying feeling," he said, "not to be able to mix with people and exchange ideas."

  It was this painful experience of speaking no language but German that led to the founding of a family dynasty as well as a successful German company -- the birth of a brand name that stands for dictionaries and language textbooks in many countries throughout the wor1d -- Langenscheidt.

  So how does a word get into a dictionary? To find this out, we spent some time with a man jokingly dubbed a "wordcatcher" by his colleagues. Lexicographer Wolfgang Worsch produces dictionaries for Langenscheidt.

  We lexicographers have a third eye and a third ear. That's to say we're very sensitive to changes in our immediate linguistic environment, including the family, television and things we hear in trains and on the subway.

  You remember certain peculiarities and somehow retain them.

  As a lexicographer, you can never switch off. You're a lexicographer, which means you've got this third ear and third eye l already mentioned. I believe you take in the linguistic reality that surrounds you with greater awareness than people who aren't involved in lexicography.

  Every year, around 5,000 new words and phrases crop up in the German language, but only 500 remain in use for any length of time. It's Worsch's job to track them down.

  There's an element of criminology involved in working on dictionaries, in the sense that you may not be hunting criminals, but you do hunt down words. Language is a dynamic entity. In a sense it's alive, and it fights tooth and nail against being forced into a straitjacket. Of course, any dictionary, especially a small one, provides only a very limited representation of the language.

  Langenscheidt's headquarters is in Munich. Almost 150 years after Gustav Langenscheidt's distressing experience of speechlessness, the company's work focuses on how to deal with newly coined words and phrases. The lexicographers meet regularly to discuss these "neologisms". If all these words were included in the dictionaries, they'd soon run out of space.

  The next term is "Nasenpflaster". It's a nose plaster used by sportsmen and women to help them breathe better. It's something new. I'm told you can find it at any chemist's these days.

  But what l saw wasn't for sportsmen. It was used for snoring.

  I called a friend in Birmingham, a lecturer and football fan. He phoned the physiotherapy department at Aston Villa, a professional soccer club in Birmingham, and the physiotherapists told him that in England, they call it a "3M" -- the brand name of "breathe right nasal strip".

  "3M breathe right nasal strip" -- nobody would say that. We can forget that.

  That's what the physiotherapists said it was called.

  That's officialese. Nobody would use that in everyday speech. I'm sure people in England call it a nose plaster or something similar.

  That's all you're worried about. I don't think I need to include it in my German-Chinese dictionary. I hardly think nose plasters will be much of an issue in China.

  Dictionaries need to be kept up to date so the users aren't disappointed. But lexicographers are deeply suspicious of buzzwords. That's why questionable candidates like "Nasenpflaster" or the political term "Sparpaket" (austerity package) are put on hold.

  So if I understand you correctly, we're not putting the word "Nasenpflaster" on our to "be processed" list, but we'll put it on the database and see how it develops over the next 6 to 12 months, okay?

  Everything I get from my colleagues goes straight in here, so the translation of "Sparpaket" is "package of austerity measures".

  Thousands of words "on probation" are stored in this database of neologisms. It's not the dictionary publishers who decide which are resurrected, but the millions of people who speak the language.

  The reference was supplied by our department head. The term was used repeatedly on the news, for example on the TV news on September 2, 1996.

  After he's caught his words, Wolfgang Worsch has to assemble them. In his study in Munich, he's putting together a new dictionary. It takes him three to five months to produce a tourist dictionary with about 18,000 words and phrases. A large dictionary with over 100,000 entries would take a lexicographer several years.

  He does the typesetting for the dictionary himself, on the computer.

  Today's buzzword might well be forgotten by tomorrow, so it's only of passing interest to lexicographers.

  A social development creates a certain social awareness, which finds expression in the language. Only when this awareness is or has been created, awareness of the environment for example, can certain expressions become established within certain languages.

  We can't make a claim to be prescriptive and tell people how to speak. We can give certain warnings and advise against using a certain word in certain languages. But in spite of repeated demands from various sides, we can't simply omit certain words, because these words, taboo words, do exist. So it's the lexicographer's job to describe them.

  One example is the contemptuous, insulting English term for people of color: Niger. It certainly wouldn't be included in smaller dictionaries. In larger ones, you'd add the explicit comment that it represents a serious insult and should definitely be avoided – that it's actually racist.

  Here is a software company in a Munich suburb. This is where some of Langenscheidt's products for the electronic media are created. On the computer, the good, old dictionary puts on a multimedia, interactive face and even overlooks mistakes. In other words, the computer dictionary offers a few extra features.

  An example: Let's say we want to know more about the English word '"cockroach". After only the first five letters, the program guesses what we're looking for and opens a little window with a definition of the insect. In addition to the familiar phonetic spelling with its odd-looking letters, you can also let your computer read out the correct pronunciation, provided it's suitably equipped.

  We could also have looked at a picture of a cockroach. Short video sequences make the language course more entertaining. You can follow the text next to the picture, and if there's something you didn't understand, you can play it again and again.

  Even if the user isn't quite sure of how to spell a term, there's still a chance of finding it. Germany has just introduced a spelling reform, so that's an advantage. We decide to look for the German word "Rhythmus", spelling it as it's pronounced, an acceptable alternative under the new rules. This produces a handful of more or less similar words from which you can select the right one. There's been a major debate in Germany about the pros and cons of the spelling reform, but certainly it has provided plenty of work for Langenscheidt.

  It won't just be on CD ROM. The tendency will be to process the content for the various media. Take a language course as an examp1e. It could be produced as a book, as a CD ROM and of course as an on-line program, possibly with a supporting television program, in order to make the huge development costs affordable on the one hand, but also to offer students something which helps them to remember things more effectively by seeing, hearing and reading.

  The mighty Watzmann peak towers above Langenscheidt's largest printing works. At the time, after the Second World War, the company could hardly have chosen a more idyllic location than this one in the Bavarian Alps.

  Here in Berchtesgaden, the dictionaries are printed on rotary presses -- several million a year.

  In the bookbindery, they are wrapped in the characteristic yellow cover with the blue L. In spite of the growing competition from electronic media, nothing will replace the dictionary for a long time to come.

  There is one last examination as the books come hot off the press, and off they go -- perhaps including words like "nasal strip" and "austerity package" -- unless they're fated to disappear from the language within a few short months.


词典的编纂

  N:1850年,一个年轻的柏林人在他那次伟大的欧洲之旅中,将旅途中令人回味的所见所闻都记了下来。

  N:17岁的古斯塔夫·兰根斯彻,这个中产阶级家庭的后裔,将每样令他着迷或失望的外国习俗都记在了日记里。

  N:他写道:“不能融入到他们中间去和他们交流思想真是件令人苦恼的事。”

  N:正是由于这次痛苦的经历,一个词典王朝诞生了。他们把世界众多国家的语言,都编成了词典和语言教科书,并为此在世界上创立了他们自己的品牌:兰根斯彻。

  N:那么,一个词是如何被收进词典的呢?为了找到答案,我们采访了为兰根斯彻工作的沃尔夫冈·伍斯克编辑员。

  WW:我们这些词典编辑员都有第三只眼睛和第三个耳朵。它的意思是说,我们对周围的语言环境十分敏感,这包括家里的、电视上的、火车和地铁里的各种语言环境。

  WW:你得留意这些词的特点并用某种方式把它们记下来。

  WW:作为一个词典编辑员,你永远不能封闭自己。这就意味着要具有我前面所提到的第三只耳朵和第三只眼睛。我想,同那些与词典编纂工作无关的人相比,你得拥有更强的吸收你身边各种语言实体的能力。

  N:每年,德国都会出现5000个新词和短语,但仅有500个会被使用相当一段时间。伍斯克的工作就是追到这些词。

  WW:编写词典有点像追捕犯人,只不过你在找的不是罪犯,而是新词罢了。语言是个有生命力的实体,从某种意义上讲,它的确是活的,并竭力反抗着任何束缚。当然,任何一种词典,特别是小词典,它所包含的词汇量都是相当有限的。

  N:兰根斯彻的总部在慕尼黑。在古斯塔夫·兰根斯彻那次痛苦的旅行过去150年后,公司如今正在把精力集中放在处理新词上。编辑员们常在一起讨论如何对待这些新词。不能全都纳入词典,因为其中一些会很快就过时了。

  D:下面要讨论的词是“顺畅呼吸贴鼻条”。这是一种运动员和妇女用来帮助自己顺畅呼吸的东西。它刚出现不久,但几乎每个药店都有卖了。

  W1:但我所看到的“鼻贴”是用来治疗打鼾的。

  WW:我给伯明翰的朋友打了个电话。他是名讲师,也是个足球爱好者。他给阿斯顿的伯明翰职业足球俱乐部的理疗中心打了个电话。那里的专家告诉他:在英格兰,他们都叫这种东西为“3M”,那是“顺畅呼吸贴鼻条”的一个品牌名。

  D:“3M牌顺畅呼吸贴鼻条”,太别扭了。

  WW:只有专家才这么说话。

  D:那是一种书面语,日常生活中没人这样叫它。我想英国人一定叫它“鼻贴”什么的。

  F2:这只是你的顾虑罢了。我觉得完全没必要把它收入到德汉词典里去。因为中国肯定没有“鼻贴”这东西。

  N:词典应该经常更新,才会令用户满意。但该如何处置像“顺畅呼吸贴鼻条”、政治术语“简单包装”之类的词汇,编辑员们仍举棋不定。

  WW:你的意思是不是说,我们没必要把“顺畅呼吸贴鼻条”这样的词收进去,该把它放在词库里,观察它在以后6到12个月里的发展情况?

  WF:我从一个同行那里得来的东西全都在这儿了。可以看出,该把“简单包装”这个词解释为:一种简单的包装方式。

  N:几千个“处于观察期的词汇”被储存在新词库里。但决定哪个词被启用的并不是出版商,而是广大百姓。

  WF:部门负责人会为我们提供有关参考数据。告诉我们哪个词在媒体中出现过多少次。比如这个词就在96年9月2日的电视新闻中出现过。

  N:伍斯克正在把搜集到的新词汇集起来编一本新词典。要编一本词汇量在1万8左右的旅游词典需花三到五个月时间;编一本10万以上词汇量的大词典则须用去一名编辑员几年的时间。

  N:他正在计算机上为词典排版。

  WW:今天的时髦词汇可能到明天就被人们遗忘了。所以编辑员是不会对这类词汇投入太多精力的。

  WW:随着社会不断发展变化,人的思想意识也在不断改变着,这就必然会体现在语言上。当一种意识产生之后,与之相关的一些词汇就自然应运而生了。

  WW:我们不能规范人们。我们只能对某些词语的使用提出一些警告和建议。尽管有来自各方面的指责,但我们还是不能忽略某些人们所禁忌的词语,因为它们的确存在,这是不能回避的事实,那么词典编辑员就有义务去对它们进行解释。

  WW:例如,有一个含有歧视有色人种的英语单词:黑鬼。当然,一般的小型词典是不会收录这种词的。但在那些大型词典中,你就必须收录它并加上明确的注释,说明这是一种侮辱性词汇,应绝对避免使用。但完全回避,不去收录它是不行的,那是一种自欺欺人的作法。

  N:这里是慕尼黑郊区的一家软件公司。他们是为兰根斯彻公司生产电子产品的众多厂家之一。他们将优秀词典放入多媒体里,在那儿有人机交流界面,甚至还有纠错功能。

  N:比如,我们想了解“蟑螂”这个英语单词的意思,在敲入前五个字母后,程序就会猜出我们想找什么了,然后它就会打开一个小窗口。上面除了有单词的解释、音标外,你还可以让计算机为你读出正确的发音。当然,这需要相应的装备。

  N:录像短片也使语言教学变得更有趣了。你可以跟着录像中的发音看旁边的文字。如果有不懂的地方,你还能反复地看。

  N:即使用户不能确定一个词的正确拼法,也能设法找到它。德国刚进行了一场拼写改革。只须根据读音大致拼写几个字母,电脑就能根据新规则提供出一系列类似的词汇,以便你从中选出正确的。在德国,人们曾对这种拼写改革进行过激烈的争论,但无论结果如何,兰根斯彻公司都有大量的工作要做。

  S:不仅仅是电子产品,未来出版行业的发展趋势就是把各种内容加工成各式各种的媒介。以语言教程为例,我们不但可以通过读书来学习;也可以用软件、光盘在电脑上进行学习;当然,还有那些在线教学节目——这可能要用电视类的东西做辅助——也能帮助你提高语言能力。总之,所有这一切都会有助于分担开发这些学习内容所付出的巨额成本。同时,帮助人们通过视、听、读等各种各样的方式来进行最有效的学习。

  N:雄伟的瓦茨曼山峰在兰根斯彻最大的印刷厂后高高耸立着。二战后,公司找不到比这儿更理想的地址了。

  N:在贝希特斯加登,公司每年都要在这儿印几百万册词典。

  N:在装订厂,它们被包上标有蓝色字母L的黄色书皮。尽管有来自电子媒介的威胁,但词典的地位仍是无可替代的。

  N:词典印出后,仍要进行最后的检查。这里面或许就有“鼻贴”之类的新词,除非它们会在短短几个月内就消失。





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