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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.A bilingual dictionary can be a wonderful tool or a terrible crutch. When you don’t know what a word means or how to say something in another language, a bilingual dictionary can give you the answer. But it’s not as simple as just looking something up and taking the first thing you see. You have to know what to look up, how to read the information provided, and how much you can depend on the answer you get. This section can help you make a bilingual dictionary a helpful tool and not a hindrance.
Figuring out what to look up
Although dictionaries have thousands of words, you can’t find every single word you want just by looking it up. Different versions of words, including plurals, feminines, verb conjugations, comparatives, and superlatives, for example, aren’t listed separately, so you need to know where to find these words. You can find them only by looking for the singular, masculine, infinitive, unmodified word. For example, suppose you see the word mettez for the first time and you want to know what it means. You grab your bilingual dictionary and discover there’s no entry for mettez. Instead of giving up, do a little grammatical analysis. Mettez ends in -ez, which is a common French verb ending, so conjugate backwards — the infinitive is likely to be metter, mettir, or mettre. Look those up, and voilà! You discover that mettre means to put. Likewise, if you can’t find traductrice, remove the feminine ending because the word in the dictionary is the default, masculine form traducteur (translator). If you’re trying to look up an expression, such as Qui se ressemble s’assemble, you can start by looking up the first word, qui, but you may not have any luck. The dictionary may include the expression under that entry, or it may list it under a different word that the dictionary editors thought was more of a key to the phrase, such as ressembler. Check there, and sure enough, you discover that it means those who resemble each other assemble, or rather, that it’s the French equivalent of the proverb birds of a feather flock together. Note: Pronominal verbs, such as se ressembler and se souvenir, are listed in the dictionary under the verb, not the reflexive pronoun. So you’d look up ressembler and souvenir, not se.
Choosing the right wordFinding the word you want is only half the battle — you also need to think about what it means, which is why you have to understand context — the situation in which you’re using the word. You may not have any idea what un avocat is, but you need to figure out from the context of the sentence you saw it in whether it’s a food or a person; when you look up avocat, you find two translations: avocado and lawyer. The context you’re using it in obviously makes a big difference as to which translation is correct (unless, perhaps, you’re reading about a lawyer who dressed as guacamole for Halloween!). Likewise, if you want to know how to say record in French, you need to know whether you’re looking for the noun, as in I bought a record, or the verb, as in I want to record this song. When you look up record in the dictionary, you see two translations: un disque and enregistrer. The dictionary doesn’t know which one you want — the correct choice depends on context and on your knowing the difference between a noun and a verb. Some people like to keep a list of words to look up later instead of putting the book or newspaper down every two minutes to look them up right away. If you’re one of these, be sure to jot down the phrase or sentence rather than just the word. Otherwise, you’ll find when you get the dictionary out that you can’t figure out which translation is best, because you have no context to fit it into.
Understanding symbols and terminology.
Dictionaries save space by using symbols and abbreviations, and these are not necessarily standard from one dictionary to the next. Your best bet is to check the first few pages of the dictionary — you should see some kind of legend that lists the abbreviations used throughout the book, the pronunciation notation, and symbols that indicate things like word stress, formality or informality, archaic words, silent letters, and so on. The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is a standard system for showing how to pronounce words in any language. Unfortunately, many dictionaries either don’t use it or adapt it with their own symbols, so you always need to check your dictionary to see which system they’re using to explain pronunciation. The second line in The symbols and abbreviations aren’t there just to look pretty! If a word is listed as archaic, you don’t want to use it (unless you happen to be translating 14th-century poetry). If a term is starred three times, indicating that it’s vulgar slang, you definitely don’t want to say that to your boss. As I explain in the preceding section, you need to think about how you’re using a particular word before you make your selection from the translations offered.
Interpreting figurative language and idioms
When using a bilingual dictionary to determine a word’s meaning, you also need to understand whether a term is being used literally or figuratively. French and English are both rich in figurative language, and translating can be tricky. Take the expression Guy is hot. Literally, this means that Guy is very warm — he’s wearing too many clothes, say, or he has a fever. Figuratively (and informally), it means that Guy is extremely good looking. If you want to translate this sentence into French, you need to figure out which meaning you’re after and then make sure to find the correct French translation for that meaning. When you look up the word, in this case, hot, the literal meaning(s) is normally listed first, followed by any figurative meaning(s). The AVOCAT [a v ka] m subst (person) lawyer, (fruit) avocado latter will have a notation such as fig. (short for figurative). (For the record, the literal translation of Guy is hot is Guy a chaud, and the figurative is Guy est sexy.) You may run across figurative language when you translate into English, too. The French expression connaître la musique literally means to know the music, such as an actual song. Figuratively, it means to know the routine. You have to think about which of these English meanings is right for the context in which you saw or heard the French expression. An idiom is an expression that can’t be translated literally into another language because one or more words in it are used figuratively. It’s raining cats and dogs doesn’t really mean that household pets are falling from the sky; it just means that it’s raining really hard. You absolutely can’t look up the individual words to come up with Il pleut des chats et des chiens — that makes no sense at all. The French equivalent of It’s raining cats and dogs is also an idiom: Il pleut des cordes (Literally: It’s raining ropes). Automated translators, such as online translation Web sites, translate very literally, which is why you should never use them to translate something that you plan to say to someone or write in a letter. All they’re good for is helping you get an idea of what something says — translating into a language you understand.
Verifying your FindingsAfter you’ve found your word or expression and have considered the context you’ll be using it in, it’s a good idea to verify what you’ve found. I suggest you use the following ideas to double-check that you’re using the right meaning:
Ask a native. The best way to verify that you’re using the right word is to ask a native speaker. Dictionaries are wonderful tools, but they’re not infallible. Language changes — particularly informal language — and dictionaries change constantly. Even if they didn’t, they still couldn’t tell you that a certain expression or way of using a particular word “just doesn’t sound right.” Native speakers are the experts. To find a native speaker, ask your professor if he or she knows anyone. If there’s a local branch of the Alliance française near you, find out the time of the next meeting. Or you can try an online forum such as http://forums.about.com/ab-french.
Do a reverse look-up. One quick and easy way to check whether the word you found is the right one is to do reverse look-up, which is when you look up the translation that the dictionary just gave you. For example, if you’ve looked up anger in the English-French part of the dictionary and found that it means colère or fureur, you can then look up those two words in the French-English dictionary. You’ll see that colère says anger and fureur says fury, so that indicates that colère is probably the better translation for anger. Another way to confirm a translation is by looking up anger in an English dictionary and colère in a French dictionary and comparing the definitions.
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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.