As recently as RR 12/5 we gave a warm welcome to the printed version of this dictionary; readers might also wish to compare the review of the Routledge German Dictionary of Environmental Technology and of the Spanish business dictionary, both in this issue. Many of the same comments will apply here also concerning the comparative merits of the book or the CD‐ROM, but there seems even greater and wider value in the CD‐ROM version in this instance where there is sometimes less precision in at least some of the terminology. The dictionary has more than 100,000 terms and references within 40 subject areas, the terminology compiled within the usual Routledge linguistic database by comparable methods and from comparable sources as the other subjects and languages in the series. These methods and sources have already been proved tried and tested across a range of subjects, as reviewed by us. The terminology offers the usual context notes and differentiates British and American terminology.
As with the Dictionary of Environmental Technology there is the same range of search features and displays. In this case the treatment of compounds is particularly valuable and extensive. For example “transport” offers 76 occurrences of which 21 are under compounds beginning “transport” and three “transport”: in this case not a computer (or compiler) mistake but in fact a quite helpful differentiation between proper names and general terms. Again, the search results are summarised on the left of the screen, the text displayed on the right. Again also we have to scroll down through compounds to find the sought highlighted version, for example through all the terms beginning “passenger” to find “passenger transport”, or all the terms beginning “London” to find “London Regional Transport”. But that is really only a minor difficulty in what is actually a very helpful search feature of bringing up all the compound forms of any particular term, wherever it occurs within the compound: it is at least a step towards a more comprehensive thesaural or classified structure.
The search software is efficient and sophisticated, the manual clear and helpful and the full help screens likewise. This will certainly be of particular use for translators or anyone writing into or from either language, but this title is also likely to prove of wider usefulness for students and others due to the broad coverage of the vocabulary. It is recommended for any specialist or linguistic collection where translating or composing is at all a regular activity.
