Friday 31 August 2012

Surveying dictionaries

I would like to share with you my knowledge of surveying dictionaries in the English-Polish language combination that are available on the market at the moment. To my knowledge, there are four bilingual surveying dictionaries for English and Polish. The oldest one, the English-German-Polish dictionary by Tatarczyk (1991) includes 5,310 entries. A modified and expanded version of this dictionary was published on CD-ROM in 2005 (Tatarczyk, 2005). It includes 8,500 entries and covers various subfields of surveying and related disciplines, e.g. astronomy, civil engineering, physics, photography, photointerpretation, GPS, geology, mining, computer science, mathematics, mining, remote sensing, optics. Apart from giving equivalent terms in the target language, the dictionary also provides gender and part of speech specification for German terms. A second surveying dictionary is the Polish-English, English-Polish dictionary of terms from the fields of surveying, cartography and real estate by Downarowicz and Leśniok (2006). It includes 30,000 entries arranged in alphabetical order. It includes only terms and their equivalents in the target language. The Internet dictionary of geomatics by Gaździcki (2005) is much more specialised than the other two dictionaries. However, at the same time it is quite limited as it covers only the part of the surveying domain that deals with state-of-the art measurement technologies and computations. The dictionary is based on the printed version of Leksykon geomatyczny - Lexicon of Geomatics (Gaździcki, 2002). The lexicon was made available on-line in 2004 and updated in 2005. It includes both English and Polish entries. However, the Polish part of the dictionary contains more information, as apart from equivalents the dictionary also gives definitions for terms which are not available for English entries. Terms in the two languages are not the same; the Polish part includes more entries than the English part. Here is the link: http://www.ptip.org.pl/auto.php?page=Encyclopedia&enc=1 The English-Polish, Polish-English dictionary by Hycner and Szortyka (2005) is organized differently as it is divided into three parts. Part 1 is devoted to technical subfields of surveying such as geodetic surveying, cartography, GPS, photogrammetry and remote sensing, while part 2 is more legal-based, covering terms referring to cadastre. Part 3 includes names of the subfields of surveying and related disciplines. Each part is arranged in alphabetic order both in English and in Polish.