DEVELOPING ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN ONLINE DICTIONARIES:CURRENT STATE AND PROSPECTS

Анотація

The article analyses the current state of English-Ukrainian online dictionaries, revealing the main fl aws
and shortcomings of such sources and prospects of their subsequent development. The need for high-quality
Internet dictionaries is justifi ed by the rapid development of digital technologies and the popularisation of
portable devices observed in recent years.
The offer of online dictionaries in Ukraine can be deemed limited and poor. The resources available
on the web are not reliable editions issued by reputable lexicographers. Most websites do not provide any
exhaustive information either on the editors of dictionaries or on the bibliographic sources used for creating
their contents.
Based on a case study of the word drift, this article testifi es that no proper compliance is ensured with
basic lexicographic principles as regards the creation of entries in English-Ukrainian web-based dictionaries:
improper categorisation is applied; insuffi cient documentation is common; the quality of translations
presented is low; poor metalinguistic information complicates the user’s understanding of the data provided 

and low user-friendliness imposes additional comprehension barriers on readers. Furthermore, a large number
of English-Ukrainian online dictionaries allow all users contributing with their own translations, without
any appropriate control on the part of professional linguists, which inevitably leads to impaired quality.
Plagiarism and the use of inferior generation and parsing algorithms are other essential factors emphasising
the low quality of the dictionaries analysed.
The dictionary entry for drift created by the author proves that there are signifi cant reserves for improving
the quality of data to be presented in English-Ukrainian online dictionaries. A professional approach
to the development of such web dictionaries should raise the quality of information available to translators
and the general public.
Subsequent research of the topic should focus on analysing particular fl aws of online dictionaries
from the grammatical, lexical, and lexicographical perspectives in more detail. Practical activities should
aim at improving the quality of translations in such online dictionaries and at ensuring their suffi cient userfriendliness
in the Internet environment.
Keywords: English-Ukrainian online dictionaries, translation dictionaries, lexicography, electronic
resources, Internet.