Massive Chinese-English dictionary ready to hit the shelves

Wu Guanghua has spent 14 years compiling a Chinese-English dictionary, which will be released by Shanghai Translation Publishing House later this year.[Photo provided to China Daily]

People behind dictionaries attracted rare media attention in 2013 after The Great Passage, a Japanese film, competed for the Academy Awards that year as a contestant in the best foreign-language film category.

In China, Wu Guanghua's world is somewhat similar to that of the movie's main characters. The 75-year-old compiler has spent the past 14 years working on a dictionary.

As a result the largest Chinese-English dictionary by scale has been created.

The two-volume A Century Chinese-English Dictionary is expected to be released by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House later this year.

"I skipped holidays and festivals, and didn't notice seasonal changes so as to complete the dictionary's 36 million words," Wu, who lives in Northeast China's port city of Dalian, Liaoning province, tells China Daily by phone.

To the publishers, it was an "opportunity of a lifetime" to work with compilers such as Wu.

Zhu Yajun, an editor at the publishing house, says it was difficult to find one's way in Wu's house through the piles of reference material when he was working on the dictionary.

"We saw him working with his desk buried in papers," Zhu says.

Born in the eastern province of Jiangsu, Wu has been working as a lexicography professor at Dalian Jiaotong University since 1965.

He has published 20 dictionaries, including the award-winning The Chinese-English Dictionary, since the 1980s.

For his latest compiling work, Wu usually started at 8 am and called it a day around 10 pm.

Even with the help of some 100 researchers and dictionary writers, he still felt time ticking away and couldn't afford to spend even a few hours to apply for extra grants for the project.

The dictionary is comprehensive and updated, says Zhang Yihua, a professor with Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in South China's Guangzhou city.

It contains more than 860,000 entries, covering about 200 areas. About 360,000 entries are related to science and technology.

The entries are listed under 40,000 individual Chinese characters, according to Wu. The authoritative Kangxi Dictionary, one of the major Chinese-language reference books compiled in the early 18th century under Emperor Kangxi's decree, has about 47,000 characters, he says.

"We've turned all the 40,000 characters into English," Wu says.