Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 180
Finally, a good bilingual dictionary will have idiomatic translations of its exam-
ple sentences, but a good translation of a sentence does not necessarily include a good
translation of each sense of each word in it. It is important for students to learn that
word-for-word translations are often clumsy and sometimes impossible, and the bilingual
dictionary is supposed to demonstrate that fact.
It may help to think of the problem in terms of Frame Semantics. In some cases,
there are very similar semantic frames across two cultures and the translation problem
is a matter of nding equivalent linguistic forms for them. For example, the commercial
transaction frame and many more speci c frames derived from it will be found in the
cultures of all developed countries; we just need to learn that English for rent is French a
louer and Chinese chuzu, and we will be able to recognize advertisements for apartments.
In other cases, the frames are quite di erent across cultures, and the problem of translation
are much deeper; e.g. it is very unlikely that the American culture-speci c sh story can
be simply translated as ` sh' + `story' anywhere else in the world, and the culture-speci c
Japanese term yagou `house/room-tag/number' has to be rendered by an explanatory phrase
in English, `Kabuki actor's stage name'.
5.4 English-Spanish Dictionaries
Collins English-Spanish Dictionary|Text
(201) |vt
a. (gen) ver
(i) see page 8 vease la pagina 8
(ii) he's seen a lot of the world ha visto mucho mundo
(iii) he'll not see 40againlos 40 ya no los cumple
(iv) Ican see toread veo bastante bien para poder leer
(v) to see sb do sthg ver a uno hacer algo
(vi) I saw him coming lo vi venir
(vii) he was seen to fall se le vio caer
(viii) I saw it done in 1968 lo vi hacer en 1968
(ix) I'll see him damned rstantes le vere colgado
(x) there was not a house to be seen no se veia ni una sola casa