Entry menus in bilingual electronic dictionaries

Abstract

The study undertakes to assess the efficiency of entry menus in bilingual dictionaries in the electronic format. An experimental dictionary interface is tested for performance in terms of access speed and task success. The task underlying dictionary use is guided Polish-to-English translation, performed under three conditions by 90 Polish learners of English. The first version of the dictionary displays a complete polysemous entry immediately after an entry is selected. In the second version the user is presented with a menu of senses; once the user clicks on the sense of choice, the full entry is shown, scrolled to the selected sense. The third version is identical to the second, but, in addition, the target sense is highlighted. Our results indicate that a combination of menu-guided sense access and target sense highlighting is effective in terms of both speed and task success, at both user levels investigated. In contrast, the menu alone is not significantly more effective than presenting the full entry at once.