Teodora Popescu and Mariana Toma, Dictionary of Business Collocations. With Romanian translation and practice section. Alba Iulia, Romania: Aeternitas. 2009. Pp 388. ISBN 978-973-1890-54-8.
1 July 2009
The English-Romanian Dictionary of Business Collocations, third edition, coauthored by Teodora Popescu and Mariana Toma, is a revised, updated and completed version of the previous issues of 2002 and 2003. With each edition, over the span of eight years, the authors have enriched the content, diversified the research methods and improved the design and layout of the dictionary with the ultimate aim of enhancing its practicability.
According to the authors’ statement in the Preface, the target users of the dictionary are “students of business, experienced business people and learners of English in general, with an intermediate to advanced level of language proficiency, who need to speak, read and write English for business purposes. It will prove an extremely useful tool for professional translators and interpreters alike” (p. 7).
The concept of the dictionary is inspired by the lexical approach to language learning advocated most notably by M. Lewis (1993), J. Sinclair (1991), N Schmitt (2000) and Carter and McCarthy (1998), who point out to the pervasiveness of collocational constructions in language. Collocations, i.e. “words that typically occur in association with other words” (Popescu 2007: 163), are the core of word knowledge, and, as Hill (2000) suggests, collocationally competent students are far more communicatively competent. The authors themselves, both experienced practitioners and researchers in the domain of teaching ESP, are convinced that a good mastery of business collocations is part and parcel of business communication, contributing to the fluency, accuracy and appropriateness of utterances.
In the Preface the authors explain that the selection of collocations was based on the criterion of frequency of occurrence of lexical combinations in the authentic data they used, namely The British National Corpus, The Brown Corpus, a self-made research corpus of business articles from The Economist (2005-2008) and existing dictionaries of collocations, as well as well-established company sites, all these documenting the actual collocability of words in the wide-ranging domains of modern business.
What are the features of the dictionary under review in terms of content? The core part of the dictionary contains 1,228 headwords and approximately 68,000 word partnerships (254 more headwords and 14,000 more collocations than in the 2nd edition) with their core general meanings and business-specific meanings. The dictionary also includes an index of the entries in alphabetical order to help the user see which words can be found in it and then find them faster. A new element of this new edition is the practice section (with answer key) made up of different types of exercise imaginatively conceived to illustrate its various uses and take the learner from working with isolated word combinations to working with texts.
Business collocations; Lexical Approach; Corpus linguistics; Business English vocabulary
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Hill, J. (2000). Revising priorities: From grammatical failure to collocational success. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching Collocation: Further Development in the Lexical Approach (pp. 28–46). Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
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Plăcintar, E. (2009). Teodora Popescu and Mariana Toma, Dictionary of Business Collocations. With Romanian translation and practice section. Alba Iulia, Romania: Aeternitas. 2009. Pp 388. ISBN 978-973-1890-54-8.. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – Jolie, 2(1), 243–246. DOI: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2009.2.1.14