Prefatory Remarks
Our
vision for this work is that it will help create a vibrant community of English
and Russian library and information science professionals who can communicate
with each other. The particular goal of this work is to increase international
understanding and collaboration between English and Russian speaking library
and information science professionals by assisting them in reading each other’s
professional literature. The two-fold specific objectives are to identify and
select relevant terminology in one language and to identify its equivalent
meaning in the other. In short, we wanted to create a useful wordbook that
would help librarians and translators as well as instructors and students in
library and information science programs.
In
terms of scope then, the English-Russian Dictionary of Library and
Information Science Terminology contains nearly 4,000 terms, including
those of a technical or scientific nature in the field of library and
information science (LIS). Because this field intersects with other disciplines
and occupations at some points, it includes terms selectively from
bibliography, the book trade, computer science, graphic arts, information
science and technology, printing, publishing, and telecommunications. We based
our selection of terms from these fields because of their relevance to
librarianship. It does not contain obsolete, slang, or other words by
intention.
Historical
Note:
Bilingual
dictionaries in Russia enjoy a long history. In manuscript form, two of the
earliest to appear were Russian-French dictionaries: Jehan Sauvage's Dictionnaire
Moscovite and André Thevet's Dictionnaire des Moscovites, both of
which circulated circa 1586. The first published dictionary is a brief Church
Slavic vocabulary of twenty-three pages entitled Leksys...Synonima
Slavenrosskaia, compiled by L. Zizanii (Vilna, 1596). However, Prokhor
Zhdanov compiled the first English-Russian bilingual dictionary of 4,000 words,
entitled A New Dictionary, English Russian (1784), for midshipmen at the
St. Petersburg Naval Academy. Actually, Lomonosov wrote the first modern
Russian grammar in 1755, paving the way for such dictionaries; the oldest
surviving grammar is a German effort by H. W. Ludolf published in Oxford in
1696.
This
dictionary started as a project of Irina B. Gorelova of Ivanovo, Russia, during
the 1995/96 academic year, when she was a Junior Faculty Development Program
Scholar at Harvard University. Marianna Tax Choldin of the University of Illinois
introduced Irina Gorelova to John Richardson via email. In as much as neither
had ever met face to face before, when John went to Moscow in the Fall of
1999, they had to arrange a meeting without knowing the other's appearance.
Like something out of a bad spy novel, John agreed to hold a copy of the Library
Quarterly in the middle of Moscow's Red
Square, so that Irina would know she had the right person.
Dr.
Richardson acquired the extramural funding for this project and hired the
senior editor, Elena Valinovskaya of St. Petersburg, who had worked on an
American slang dictionary for student use at the St. Petersburg State Academy
of Culture in June 1995. On the current project, she converted the paper files
of the initial dictionary and extended the dictionary beyond the letter R.
During the 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 academic years, Elza Gousseva served as
a consulting editor on this project when she was a Visiting Scholar at UCLA.
Her work at UCLA was conducted partially under the U.S. Department of State’s
Junior Faculty Development Program. Ms. Gousseva is from the Moscow State
University of Culture and Arts where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department
of Library Science. During her two years as a MLIS graduate student at UCLA,
Inna Ilinskaya worked on the dictionary as the associate editor.
Word
List and Treatment:
The
initial compiler and then the editor in chief examined numerous sources during
the initial compilation of the prospective word list. (See the extensive English, Russian, and other sources consulted by clicking on the active links;
for the early part of the dictionary, up to the letter R, we found Англо-русский
библиотечно-библиографический
словарь (1958) and Англо-русский
словарь книговедческих
терминов (1962), especially helpful; for the remainder,
we appreciated the work of the British Council, Bibliothekarishches
Handwörterbuch; Librarian’s Dictionary; Nastolny Slovar Bibliotekaria
(1995). From this candidate list, we selected those terms used by American
librarians in everyday practice, our corpus, which we believed would satisfy
the needs of our audience. Then, the associate editor verified all the English
entries for the proper Russian terms.
We
believe that this corpus will satisfy the Russian's growing interest in the
international literature of library and information science, which Mikhail
Gorbachev's glasnost has inspired since 1985. Not surprisingly, more words of
foreign origin are moving from the periphery toward the center of the Russian
corpus (see below).
Main
entries are capitalized and arranged using the word-by-word rules for filing;
American spellings are used consistently throughout the dictionary for the
English main entries. The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (online) served as the authority for the spellings
and hyphenation. We trust that our British users will know the common variant
British spellings without much difficulty. In general, we have avoided
prepositional entries, preferring entries to begin with nouns or less
occasionally adjectives.
The
translations developed from the usage discussions among the editorial staff
members and are intended to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, in
nature. When more than one Russian word is given in an entry, the first term is
the more pure Russian word or phrase rather than the merely transliterated form
of the English word. The remaining phrases are listed in order of frequency of
occurrence in Russian. Nonetheless, many loan words are technological (or
devices and gadgets) in origin, such as computer, fax, megabyte, modem, pager,
printer or toner, and these are often transliterated into Russian while other
terms, such as e-mail can be, but probably shouldn't be following Aleksandr
Isaevich Solzhenitsyn's 1995 position. Then, there are some relatively common
English words, such as devotional book, are rather difficult to translate,
given the historical suppression of religious terms during the Soviet era.
We
have enjoyed the linguistic observations in Larissa Ryazanova-Clark and Terence
Wade's The Russian Language Today (London: Routledge, 1999) and
recommend it to anyone interested in a portrayal of the Russian language at the
end of the 20th century.
Please
note that each entry includes English and Russian pronunciations (see
supplementary material below). We included synonyms and generally marked them
with the appropriate cross references (i.e., see or see also references). The
see also references include meanings which should be compared.
Supplementary
Material:
Note
as just mentioned that the compilers have provided extensive see and see also
references. In addition, there is an abbreviation chart.
One
innovative feature of the fothcoming online work and the CD-ROM version will
be the electronic pronunciation of LIS terms by native speakers. John Richardson,
a Midwestern born but Californian speaker, who will record the English terms.
The Russian speaker for the letters A through C is Inna A. Ilinskaya, a St.
Petersburg native who has studied in the United States at UCLA.
Sound
Engineering:
Some
users may be interested in the technical details of the sound recording. Based on
advice from our sound engineer, Dana Wood, we acquired the following recording
equipment: one Applied Research and Technology Tube Microphone Preamp
(Professional Processor series), a Shure SM57 cardioid dynamic microphone (with
a range of 50-15KHz) mounted on a microphone desk stand connected with a
microphone cable through the ART preamp to a Dell Optiplex GX110 with an AC97
sound card on the Intel motherboard. The tube preamp's input was set to 2
o'clock (less an +40dB), normal gain, no phase reverse, and +10 dB output.
To
record our voices, we acquired a copy of Sonic Forge's Sound Forge XP Studio
5.0b (Build 162). Software settings included recording attributes of 44,100Hz,
16-bit, and stereo. We saved our custom settings as sound files in MPEG Layer-3
audio compression format using a template consisting of 64Kbps, highest quality
VBR stereo audio. Post-processing of the files included noise reduction and
equalization to remove ambient background noise. We merged our edited sound
files with HTML files using an MP3inserter program written by Mark Bendig,
with some helpful advice from Andy Houghton.
If
you are interested in reading more about this topic, I recommend John J.
Volanski's Sound Recording Advice For the Home Recording Studio; An
Instruction and Reference Manual That Demystifies The Home Recording Studio
Experience (San Diego, CA: Pacific Beach Publishing, 2002).
The
Present Print Format and Forthcoming Formats:
For
the moment, this work is complete as printed. However, Dr. Richardson is seeking
further extra-mural funding to support the posting all of the letters with
sounds on the web at http://purl.org/net/LIS_Terms as well
as on a CD-ROM--only a few letters are there now for illustrative purposes.
The original version of this work was set in a clear, readable typeface called
Baltica, popular in Russia, using italics and boldface
type for emphasis. However, the difficulty of displaying English and Cyrillic
characters together on the Website led to some exceptionally challenging computer
programming; hence, we are now using Arial Unicode MS and
a browser neutral setting. We appreciate Tim Wood's (Seattle, Washington)
help with the Unicode encoded font. If you are interested in reading more
about these technical difficulties, click here.
Acknowledgments:
Without
the extramural funding from the Office of Research at OCLC (headed by Dr. Terry
Noreault at the time) and Beta Phi Mu’s Harold Lancour Scholarship for Foreign
Study, and two successive grants from UCLA’s Council on Research, this project
could not have been undertaken.
The
editor greatly appreciates the assistance of the advisory board, which consists
of Dr. Robert Burger, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Slavic and
East European Library; Dr. Charles E. Gribble, The Ohio State University,
Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures; Dr. Irina
L. Klim, Providence, Rhode Island (formerly the American Center, St. Petersburg,
Russia); Ms. Patricia Polansky, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Hamilton Library
Russian Collection; Dr. Bradley L. Schaffner, University of Kansas, Library
Slavic Department; and Dr. Yakov L. Shraiberg, National Library of Science
and Technology, Moscow. In addition to the advisory board members, several
individuals have been instrumental in making this work a success: Dr. Gerry
Benoît, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky; and Mr. Ralph Levan,
Research Scientist, OCLC Office of Research, and Mr. Dana Wood of Danasound
(Los Angeles).
In
conclusion, the editor hopes that the reader will find this wordbook to be a
current, comprehensive and authoritative source concerned with library and
information science matters. Perhaps you will agree as Samuel Johnson once
said: "dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and
the best cannot be expected to go quite true."
Let
us know your suggestions for its improvement.
Los
Angeles, California: 7 October 2003.
