On CEDU’s treatment of culture-bound lexical items under the beyond-equivalence principle

Abstract

The Chinese–English Dictionary Unabridged (hereinafter abbreviated as CEDU) pursues a guiding principle of reserved descriptivism and includes far more culture-bound entries than other Chinese–English dictionaries, which has greatly increased the difficulty in dictionary-making. Accordingly, how CEDU has planned to treat culture-bound lexical items in principle and how it has tackled the difficulties in applying the principle deserves our attention. This study probes into the essence of the beyond-equivalence principle proposed by its editor-in-chief Lu Gusun and his ideas of acculturation and cultural over-flow. This study explores three major compensation operations in treating culture-bound lexical items: 1) to use lexicographical metalanguage to compensate for lacunae beyond equivalence, 2) to compensate for the treatment of an entry word through examples, 3) to use both foreignization and domestication to compensate one another in rendering equivalents.