Interview

Della Summers

Della Summers is the Director of the dictionaries department at Longman in the UK. ELT News editor Mark McBennett spoke with her on her visit to Japan in September, 2003 to promote the publication of the 4th edition of Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE4, pronounced 'eldos 4.' Also in Tokyo to promote LDOCE4 was renowned linguist Prof. David Crystal, the subject of the next ELT News interview). Ms. Summers is from Swindon in Wiltshire.

As the original publisher of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, Longman is the oldest British company in the business of managing and marketing language reference material.

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ELT: Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Longman?
DS: I've been in dictionaries for about 30 years and at Longman for 26 years, most of the time doing ELT dictionaries. I was the publisher of the first edition, in 1978, and the second edition, and the Dictionaries Director for the third edition in 1995. I'm also the person behind the Activator, various other Longman dictionaries, and also the corpus developments have been things that I've tried to make happen. That includes the British National Corpus, the Longman Corpus Network, the Longman Learner's Corpus and so on.

Did you join Longman specifically to take over the first edition of the dictionary?
I suppose so, yes. That was why there was a vacancy, and I'd worked on native speaker dictionaries before - I was one of the founding editors of the Collins English Dictionary.

And what is your role there, on a day to day basis?
I run the dictionaries department, a department of about 30 people, made up of seven nationalities. We have staff in the US and in Japan, and the people that you don't see are the freelance lexicographers, software developers and so on, who are all accessing our material from a server. So we have a network of about 75 people who regularly access our databases from different countries around the world. And I have publishers and editors who report to me.

And if I can just explain what it's like to be a lexicographer, not that I have been one for some years! They work seven hours a day. Everything is highly computerized, leading-edge or state of the art, you might say. They're usually revising or compiling a new entry or word. And the way that they work is that they look at the corpus first, looking for the patterns of language, collocations, semantics, and grammatical information obviously. And by analyzing these, they split the use of the word into different meanings.

And they input everything into a, well, a horrendously complicated computer system, I'm afraid! They complain about it rather a lot, but that system enables us to make CD-ROMs for most of the dictionaries.

So the CD-ROM, rather than an afterthought, is an integral part of the whole dictionary compilation process?
Yes, we plan that from the very beginning. With LDOCE4, we knew from the beginning that there was so much more information that we could give, but that just wouldn't fit in the book. So the book got a lot bigger, about 15% bigger. But with the CD-ROM we were able to add encyclopedic entries, the whole text of the new 2002 edition of the Longman Language Activator, another 70,000 edited examples based on the corpus, and 1.3 million extra sentences which are connected to phrases in the dictionary - when you click on a phrase or collocate, the computer creates a list of examples from the corpus. So there's a lot in this edition about phraseology, collocations...this is way in advance of what any dictionary has done before.

Longman was a bit hesitant about getting involved in the handheld dictionary market a decade or so ago. What's the situation now?
The Longman Advanced American Dictionary is on the ExWord, the Casio handheld dictionary which is one of the best sellers in Japan. And Seiko have LDOCE3 and the Essential Activator on one of their products. So we are publishing through another party and we leave the technology side of it to them.

The technical ideas that we have, which are usually grounded in ELT rather than just the technology itself, are focused on the CD-ROMs that come with just about all the dictionaries. For example, the CD-ROM links to the Internet, so you have the dictionary in a pop up and you're online; you press control and hover your cursor over a word and it looks the word up for you. I often compare it to having your dictionary beside you, always open at the right page.

What do you think of the handheld dictionaries that are on the market today? How useful and user-friendly are they?
I think they're very useful, there have been lots of great developments and obviously they're extremely popular. They also contain lots of dictionaries, twenty or thirty in some cases, which you would never be able to carry around.

My only reservation about them is that they perhaps are offering a solution which is a bit too quick. The kind of information we have in our dictionaries, there's a lot - there's collocations, examples, usage notes, word focus boxes. But if you're looking at a handheld, you don't see allof that because the screen it just too small compared to two pages of a book which you can easily scan.

If you're studying, and you want to internalize something, I don't think the handhelds are the way. I don't think they're really cognitive or good for long-term language acquisition. Whereas I think you can really improve your English if you look at the "peripheral" content of these ELT dictionaries.

What dictionary do you yourself use generally?
I don't need one! (laughs) No, I would use LDOCE. And if it was an obscure word, I would probably go to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). David Crystal made the same point about using the OED for rare or historical words or LDOCE, which almost all the time is going to have the best definition.

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