Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

53Table 2. Anisomorphism: example of differences in the conceptual structures (adaptedfrom Svensen 2009)MeaningPortuguese French German Danishtree árvore arbre Baum traeheating material lenhaconstruction material madeira boissmall area of trees bosquelarge area of trees floresta forêtHolzWaldskovEach of the languages presented in Table 2 has a term for designating ―aperennial plant having a self-supporting woody main stem or trunk (which usuallydevelops woody branches at some distance from the ground), and growing to aconsiderable height and size‖ (definition of tree in OED online). However, not all fourlanguages have a monoreferential term that exclusively refers to ―heating material‖. Forinstance, the French word bois can either refer to ―heating material‖ or ―constructionmaterial‖ or even ―a small area of trees‖, whereas Portuguese has distinct words foreach meaning. In these particular cases, among the four languages Portuguese is the onewhich makes the most distinctions and Danish is the one which makes the less.It is relevant to mention here that this kind of differences in the structures ofconceptual systems raises an important problem when it comes to elaborating abilingual or multilingual dictionary: directionality. For instance, the German equivalentof lenha is Holz but lenha is not always the equivalent of Holz as madeira can also bethe equivalent of Holz. For this reason, if the dictionary user is looking up thePortuguese-German section of a dictionary, s/he will not have difficulty in choosing theright equivalent, but if s/he is looking up the German-Portuguese section, s/he should beinformed that Holz translates in Portuguese in two different ways so that s/he chooses