The precedents of bilingual dictionaries of religious vocabulary in modern Russia

Abstract

The compilation of specialized bilingual dictionaries of religious vocabulary in modern Russia is concerned with a number of methodological difficulties caused by the political and cultural history of the Russian area. The English-Russian and German-Russian dictionaries of religious vocabulary considered in the proposed review, compiled in the period from the 1990s to 2021, reflect the author’s solutions to the problems of intercultural communication and adequate translation of relevant meanings. In the peer-reviewed dictionaries, one can observe both various approaches of the excerption of religious vocabulary (special vocabulary of the main world religions, Christian liturgical, biblical, theological, heortological vocabulary, vocabulary of scientific and theological discourses), and different ways of terminography and translation interpretation. The analysis of peer-reviewed publications is methodologically focused on the critical coverage of the following points: the design of the vocabulary, the criteria for the inclusion of nomenclature names (biblical names, toponyms, etc.), the propriety and degree of prevalence of contextual exemplification of the term. There is an obviously positive trend in the development of German-Russian dictionaries, while the state of development of English-Russian dictionaries of religious vocabulary is somewhat inferior to the former in a number of parameters.