Lexicographic Treatment of Loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in the Bosnian-German Dictionary

Abstract

This paper aims to describe lexicographic strategies for treating loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in a productive bilingual Bosnian-German dictionary. In terms of number, stylistic and cultural features, those words significantly characterize the Bosnian language. In lexicography, they have the status of cultural-bound words with a high degree of anisomorphism. We will look into their description in existing monolingual and bilingual dictionaries as well as into their equivalents in literary translations to propose more suitable equivalents. In this paper, we focus in particular on lexicographic treatment strategies of partial and zero equivalence, taking into account the deep cultural embeddedness of Arabic, Turkish and Persian loanwords in the Bosnian language. It will be shown that specific concepts such as “tekija”, for which the German language has no word, and the existing bilingual dictionary provides an equivalent „Muslim monastery“ (Jakić & Hurm 1992: 1053), can be treated by combined strategies to obtain more suitable equivalents, such as the incorporation of the source item into the target language with an additional explanation as well as an explanatory equivalent.