拥有115年悠久历史的牛津词典本月推出了新版《牛津英汉-汉英词典》,其中收录了“山寨”、“房奴”等近年来流行的中文词汇。据介绍,为了编纂这本新发行的中英文词典,中英两国的出版社共计60名编辑人员花费了近5年的时间。
The 115-year-old prestigious(有名望的) Oxford Dictionary will now include popular new Chinese terms like "shanzhai" "youtiao" and "fangnu", as part of the modern Chinese language.
As China plays a more and more important role in the world economy, the Chinese language is forever evolving, attracting more attention from people who want to understand this ancient yet vibrant(充满生气的) language.
For instance, the word "shanzhai" is used to describe the plethora(过多,过剩) of cheesy(下等的) wigs on sale in many shops and markets. Or another example would be the countless knockoffs(名牌仿制品) of iPhones or designer(享有盛名的) bags imprinted with Louis Vuitton logos.
Another new term in the new edition is the word "fangnu", or a "mortgage slave" - a term used to describe the phenomenon in larger cities whereby well-educated youth complain of a miserable existence due to the heavy burden of a home mortgage.
All these new or often fashionable terms can be found in the new Oxford English-Chinese, Chinese-Englishdictionary that was unveiled in the recently concluded Beijing International Book Fair(书展) last week.
The dictionary now is available for retail sales since the beginning of this month.
This dictionary is the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary and contains 670,000 words and phrases after five years of preparation. Sixty editors from the Oxford University Press and its partner in China - the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press - worked together on the project. According to Julie Kleeman, the dictionary's chief editor, most of the firm's editors were Chinese, while about one fourth were native-English speakers.
"We don't want to make it florid(绚丽的) , we want it to be modern and conversational... many of the words in the present dictionary are no longer in use," said Kleeman. "The need for studying Chinese by foreigners today is totally different from decades ago... Precise, native and practical - that is our core advantage," she said.
She added the dictionary also has a sidebar(工具条,侧边栏) section that explains words that pack in too much cultural information, like "hutong", a traditional architecture style common in the narrow lanes of Beijing. Another would be "youtiao" the popular Chinese breakfast staple usually eaten with soybean milk(豆浆) .
According to the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press' press release, terms included in the new version of dictionary were selected from both the Oxford English Corpus and the, City University of Hong's LIVAC Synchronous Corpus.
Kleeman said newer publications updates will be available only for the online version as language often changes too quickly for book versions to keep pace. The online version will also offer a Chinese phonetic pronunciation guide.
The online version, allowing access via different platforms from the PC to the iPad, will be ready "as soon as possible", Kleeman said.