Literary Quotations in Bilingual Dictionaries: A Case Study of a Nineteenth-century Dutch–Chinese Dictionary

The phenomenon of literary quotations in dictionaries finds its origin in the days when the search for equivalents was intertextual rather than interlingual based. For both monolin­gual and bilingual dictionaries the purpose of literary quotations is to supply evidence of usage and illuminate the meaning of the relevant headword, with the difference that for bilingual dic­tionaries this is done via translation. This article examines this phenomenon in a nineteenth century Dutch–Chinese dictionary by analysing sample sentences that the compiler has extracted from original Chinese texts. Discuss... Mehr ...