Translation for business purposes and current issues in bilinguallearnerlexicography

Abstract

In the article it is shown that the gap between learner lexicography and cognitive methodology can, and should be, narrowed in an ongoing way and on a step-by-step basis. Dictionaries for learners of English are becoming increasingly corpora-based, and this factor brings foreign language users closer to authentic (or real) English. At the same time, however, bilingual dictionaries lag behind as they do not always take into account the results of research work related to thinking processes, mental lexicon, and cognitive mechanisms of language learning and language use. It is therefore essential that different aspects of learner lexicography be examined, updated and adapted to the most recent discoveries of cognitive linguistics and cognitive methodology. With this in mind, it is demonstrated in the several successive subsections of the present article how illustrative phraseology, i.e. select lists of collocations and utterances, included in the learner’s business dictionary, can be re-worked and reorganized through the synchronization of cognitive and communicative planes for teaching both Business English and translation for business purposes to advanced Russian-speaking students at English Departments at universities across the Russian Federation. The main goal is twofold: to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and to combine the author’s conception of Business English with the author’s theory of translation for business purposes. The combination of the two original conceptions makes it possible to re-structure the list of headwords comprising both core business terms and high-frequency lexical items within the third edition of the learner bilingual business dictionary. The underlying cognitive-communicative methodology is applied to all the five elements of the dictionary entry, viz. the headword, its English-based definition, its Russian equivalent (or equivalents), the Russian-based definition of the headword, and the listing of high-frequency collocations and contexts that illustrate how the word or the core business term should be used in spoken and written business discourse.

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