When we use bilingual dictionaries, what makes us believe that the translations they offer are valid? Comparing the English nouns smile, grin, smirk, sneer with their translations in bilingual English-Russian and English-French dictionaries, I consider as criteria of translational adequacy the following: ostensive (referential) equivalence, etymology, morphology, phonology, (monolingual) definitional equivalence, (bilingual) reversion (reversibility). The special characteristics of reversion suggest that It might be worth distinguishing translation equivalents (=reversible items typically heteroglossal synonyms) as a hyponymic subset of translations (=heteroglossal definitions). Not considered here (for lack of immediately accessible evidence) is contextual or cotextual equivalence, though it would be significant if items in different languages had similar collocations and colligations.

A comparison of the treatment of a culturally significant concept, the Crusades, in dictionaries of several languages, in the hope of learning about dictionaries and the dictionarate cultures that produce and use them – and in order to encourage colleagues to undertake such comparisons.

A comparison of the treatment of three culturally significant concepts, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, in dictionaries of several languages, in the hope of learning about dictionaries and the dictionarate cultures that produce and use them – and in order to encourage my colleagues to undertake such comparisons.

This is one of a series of essays comparing the treatment of related items in monolingual dictionaries of English, French, and Russian. Previous essays introduced and exemplified the principles of such analysis applied in the articles dealing with the Abrahamic religions and the Crusades.