Harrap's New Standard French and English Dictionary III (töredék) [antikvár]

^he late J. E. Mansion, author olHarrap's Standard French English Dictionary, began work on his project in the years immediately preceding World War I, and Part I (French-English) was published in 1934. Part II (English-French) appeared in February 1939 and, precisely forty years on, in February 1979, we completed the manuscript of the revised edition of it. Research work on the revision of the dictionary as a whole was begun in 1945, when a card index was compiled by the wearisome task of cutting up copies of the original edition. In a very short space of time thousands of new cards had been added, representing words not appearing in the original dictionary and new acceptations of existing words. The mass of new material increased with even greater rapidity once the compilation of the manuscript of the first part was begun, as in a very large percentage of cases an addition to it meant a new card for the second part. The new material has been derived from a number of sources: the examination of the most modern unilingual dictionaries; the reading of periodicals and recently published books; the study of advertisements and public notices; suggestions sent in by users of the dictionary; and words or expressions gleaned quite fortuitously in the course of conversation. We should like in this context to express our gratitude to our friends living in and around Holyport, where we have our permanent home, and Les Pilles, the village in southern France where we have a house that was the scene of much of our labours, for the help they so frequently gave us, often unconsciously, in finding the word we were looking for. When the French-English part of the Harrap's New Standard French and English Dictionary was published in the autumn of 1972 we had already begun work on the compilation of the second part. Our preliminary studies and consultations had already confirmed our fears that we were undertaking a task even more formidable than the revision of the first part, so that it was hardly encouraging when some of our friends (not lexicographers) said to us, "Well, now that you've done the French-English the English-French shouldn't take all that much time!". If one is compiUng a bilingual technical dictionary it is true to say that the second part is to a considerable extent, though by no means completely, the mirror image of the first. When one is tackling the second part of a large general bilingual dictionary, there are additional complications; the straight translations of scientific words or the names of concrete objects will have in the main been solved in the compilation of the first part; but a very important element in a general dictionary is the translation of idiomatic phrases, only some of which can be rendered by an equally idiomatic phrase in the second language. For this English-French part we have therefore devoted a considerable amount of time to studying idioms from the standpoint of English usage, particularly in view of the large number of expressions which have been introduced into the language since 1939, and of the fact that many phrases which were Americanisms then are standard English in Britain today.