Collins-Robert French-English/English-French Dictionary [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is the second in a major series of bilingual dictionaries. Like its predecessor, Collins Spanish Dictionary, which was received with acclaim when it appeared in 1971, it embodies a fresh approach to bilingual lexicography, with its emphasis on the current, living language of everyday communication. A team of British and French lexicographers has planned, worked, and polished over a period of 15 years to fashion this Dictionary into as perfect a tool as possible to promote accurate and easy communication between the speakers of two great world languages. We have tried to define and meet the needs of a wide range of users, from those with an academic or professional commitment—teachers at all levels, translators, students of French or English, as the case may be—through business people whose affairs demand an ability to conduct discussion or correspondence in both languages, to the large numbers of people of each nationality who are interested in the language, literature and culture of the other and know that only the best possible dictionary is a good enough tool. In realizing this aim we in Collins count ourselves singularly fortunate to have secured the wholehearted collaboration of Paul Robert and la Société du Nouveau Littré, whose magistral Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française first appeared in 1953. The publication of Le Grand Robert, Le Petit Robert and Le Micro Robert made an immediate and outstanding contribution to French lexicography, and Collins are happy to have as a source for this bilingual dictionary the Robert range with its leading reputation. The resulting Collins-Robert French Dictionary, a true co-publication, brings a new dimension in authenticity and reliability to bilingual lexicography. This collaboration, the availability to our lexicographers of the archives of the Dictionnaire le Robert and the skills of its lexicographers, added to our rigorous policy that every French word in the Dictionary was created and vetted by French lexicographers and every English word by English lexicographers, with constant and full discussion between them, means that French-speaking and English-speaking users can approach this Dictionary with equal confidence. It is truly an international Dictionary. We offer this new Dictionary in the confident hope that this basic strength, and the many other features described in the pages that follow, will establish it in the appreciation of all who use it. I must, in conclusion, express my keen appreciation of the work of the many compilers and collaborators whose skill and insight have helped to make the Dictionary the book it is, and in particular, of course, the General Editors, who have lived with and laboured on the text of the Dictionary for so many years. Jan Collins