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.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Recently, I found an interesting book on the longitude problem by Dava Sobel. The book entitled 'Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time' is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest.
The 'longitude problem' was the serious dilemma of the eighteenth century. Lacking the ability to measure longitude, sailors and explorers had literally been lost at sea. Dava Sobel's book shows how this problem was solved. She presents the figure of John Harrison, self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker, and his forty-year obsession with building the perfect timekeeper which could help to calculate the longitude on the sea.
The book gave me some hints on where to look for navigation instruments used in the past.
Harrison's chronometers as well as many other instruments may be found in the National Maritime Museum in London.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/


The Science Museum in London also has a Surveying section. Unfortunately, it will be closed till summer time.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/