ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several general characteristics of bilingual Spanish – Japanese/Japanese – Spanish dictionaries. The first part of the chapter comprises a generic introduction of certain linguistic issues pertaining to Spanish – Japanese/Japanese – Spanish dictionaries. To accomplish this purpose, the introduction overviews the history of these dictionaries, particularly of editions published in Japan.
In contrast to lexicons dealing only with Western languages, the Spanish – Japanese language combination implies unique difficulties such as the issue of writing; the Japanese language, in addition to two syllables and kanji (Chinese characters), incorporates rōmaji (a Latin alphabet to transcribe Japanese), which can facilitate the reading of the Japanese script for beginner students. The first part of the chapter briefly elucidates the fundamental characteristics of the Japanese script for readers who do not know Japanese.
The second part of the chapter presents the characteristics of some major Spanish—Japanese/Japanese—Spanish bilingual dictionaries published in Japan and addresses specific difficulties pertaining to concepts or objects that have no equivalents in Japanese, the type of writing system used for entry words or pronunciations, how the meaning of polysemic words in Japanese may be gauged, and so on.
