Developing a Frame-Based Bilingual Corpus and Dictionary of Road Transportation Terms

Although translators are a major group of users of bilingual dictionaries, they have been regarded by lexicographers as identical to other users and their needs have been largely neglected. Over the recent years, the development of translator dictionaries has become an important trend in both theory and practice. In this context, the present paper reports on a study to compile a bilingual dictionary of Persian and English in the field of road transportation with an emphasis on translators as the main audience. This dictionary is based on a bilingual comparable corpus which was annotated using semantic frames. A user interface was then designed to search the database with several options including meaning-oriented, as opposed to alphabetic, search. This provides translators facing an increasingly transforming job profile with another route to access more natural ways of expressing a concept in the target language. In the end, the results of this project are discussed in the context of translation-oriented lexicography.