FROM THE EDITOR
In this Issue
Contributors
Letters to the Editor
Write to Us
Spread the Word
Back Issues

FEATURE
'We put the top on the job'
False friends between
Dutch and English

Common false friends
between Dutch and English

COLUMNS
Language Interference
Language interference
outside word meaning

Focus on Language
Awareness:

Introduction
British and American English

Difference in semantics and pronunciation
UK version ¦ US version

New word of the month
Neologisms from American English

Top Tips for the CD-ROMs
Using the CD-ROM to explore British and American false friends

onestopenglish.com

 

Contributors

Kevin Cook

Kevin Cook, of English-Irish origin, has been working in the Netherlands as a translator and English teacher since 1983. His first book Dubbel Dutch (Double Dutch), a practical guide for students of Dutch, was published in 1995. Kevin was co-author of Eindelijk Engels! (English at Last!), published in 2003 by Kemper Conseil Publishing.

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Daniel Gibb

Daniel Gibb, born in Scotland, has been working in the Netherlands as an English teacher and translator since 1980. Much of his teaching experience is reflected in the book he co-authored with Kevin Cook. The title of the book is Eindelijk Engels! (English at Last!) and it was published in 2003 by Kemper Conseil Publishing.

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Mairi MacDonald

Mairi taught English in Lithuania and Poland before returning to the UK to work in publishing. She has worked on several multimedia dictionary projects including the Macmillan English Dictionary on CD-ROM. Mairi works part-time as editor of History Online, a website aimed at secondary school teachers. The rest of her time is devoted to various ELT projects and developing learning materials for the web.

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Kerry Maxwell

Kerry has a first degree in computational linguistics and an MA in theoretical linguistics from the University of Manchester, specialising in syntactic theory.

For several years she worked as a researcher at Manchester and Essex universities, where in connection with European projects on machine translation, she was involved in computational lexicography, co-ordinating research in computational descriptions of compounds and collocations, and presenting her work in various international academic contexts.

In 1993 she joined Cambridge University Press as a lexicographer/editor and grammar consultant, and worked on a large number of Cambridge learners’ dictionaries, including the English Pronouncing Dictionary, the Cambridge International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary in print and CD-ROM versions.

In June 2001 Kerry moved to York where she now works as a freelance editor/lexicographer and is involved in a range of dictionary and grammar projects.

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Dr. Don R. McCreary

Dr. Don R. McCreary (Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Delaware, 1984), Professor of English and Linguistics, works primarily in lexicography and applied linguistics, as well as ESOL. He edited DawgSpeak!, the dictionary of UGA student slang, (2001, 2003, 2nd ed.), which is on the English Department’s web page, www.english.uga.edu. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at two universities, the National University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur in 1991-1992, and Péter Pázmány Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary in 2001-2002; an Erlangen Exchange professor at the Federal University of Erlangen, Germany in 1997, and a Moss Fellow at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 1985.

Dr. McCreary is the Associate Editor of the Japanese-English Science and Engineering Dictionary (OHM, 1988), the English-Japanese Science and Engineering Dictionary (OHM, 1993), and has authored many articles on lexicography and Japanese applied linguistics in journals such as the International Journal of Lexicography, Lexicographica, Semiotica, and Language Sciences. He is also the co-author, with Fredric Dolezal, of ‘Pedagogical Lexicography Today: A Critical Bibliography on Learners’ Dictionaries with Special Emphasis on Language Learners and Dictionary Users’ (Lexicographica Series Maior 96. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999). He is on the Advisory Panel of the Macmillan English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary at Macmillan.

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Diane Nicholls

I don’t know how or when I became a lexicographer, though I think I have always been a linguist. My first degree, in Russian and French at the University of Reading led on to a postgraduate diploma in technical and specialized translation from the Polytechnic of Central London. A long spell of working as a translator, freelance and in-house, brought me to the realization that my passion for languages lay in the individual words themselves rather than in any finished documents I might produce and that translating, while a great discipline, would never allow me the time to ‘enjoy’ the words.

I returned to academic study and an Mlitt in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University. There I spent my time analysing and enjoying the language and style of the short stories of Anton Chekhov and wondering how I would ever manage to make a living using my language skills. Freelance work at Cambridge University Press provided the answer and my first non-user experience of dictionaries.

It was through my work on False Friends for the Cambridge International Dictionary of English that I came into contact with the Acquilex project – an international computational lexicography project on multilingual lexical databases. Two years of working as a research assistant on Acquilex provided me with an excellent apprenticeship and finally sealed my fate (in career terms).

Since the end of the Acquilex project in 1995 I have worked as a freelance linguist/lexicographer and revelled in the variety and flexibility this role offers. I have worked on highly commercial software development projects as far away as Silicon Valley in California, on academic research projects closer to home and in Hong Kong and the US and on a variety of dictionary publishing projects, including learner corpora, learners’ and native-speaker dictionaries and thesauruses (CUP, Bloomsbury, OUP, Macmillan). Among other things, I seem to have found a niche in developing and executing categorization and coding systems and can usually be found wading up to my neck in words, trying to marshal them into some sort of order while secretly admiring their slipperiness.

Writing articles for the MED resource site provides me with an opportunity to get a few things off my linguistic chest and express some of my admiration for the things that words can do and the problems they can cause their users.

I live in Hackney, London with my husband, Rory.

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Meet the Editor
Kati Sule

Kati was born in Hungary. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Szeged in south-east Hungary and also completed an ELT degree, writing her dissertation on the role of monolingual dictionaries in ELT. She taught English as a foreign language in Hungary and briefly in the Netherlands.

Kati moved to the UK in 1998 and has worked as an ELT editor since 1999. She has been involved in the Macmillan English Dictionary project, focusing on the illustrations in the dictionary, and was editor of the Macmillan English Dictionary Workbook. She has also worked on the CD-ROM edition of MED and is one of the editors of the Macmillan English Dictionary resource site.

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Cover photos by Haddon Davies (new word of the month); Corbis Corporation, 1999 (feature article: windmill, canal); Corbis Corporation, 2000 (feature article: bicycle); Corbis Corporation, 2001 (tulips)
Cover illustration by Ian Foulis and Associates (zip); Peter Richardson (trainers)
Cover design by Mairi MacDonald

Eindelijk Engels!: http://www.kemperconseil.com/index2.html
Double Dutch: http://www.kemperconseil.com/indextaalkunde.htm