Such communities are present in our lives even though most of the time, we are unaware of them, a form of invisibility that makes such imagined communities even more powerful. In this sense, dictionaries are very similar to textbooks, in that dictionaries of science and technology, for example, are often used to train technical translators or students exploring a new subject field.ĥDictionaries also participate in knowledge legitimation as tools for creating what Anderson calls “imagined communities” that can be defined as communities consisting of people who “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (2006: 6). Their connection with education is obvious from the very first glossaries created by monks for self-education (Jackson, 2002: 31 Landau, 1984: 37), the “hard word” dictionaries that were supposed to help women and children learn “difficult” words (Béjoint, 1994: 94), the dictionaries of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries created in the Academies (Landau, 1984: 48) and finally, to modern learner’s dictionaries (Jackson, 2002: 129). First of all, they have the ability to influence knowledge legitimation as powerful tools for education. Theory: Power of DictionariesĤDictionaries possess several types of power. The methods include cultural analysis, lexicographic archaeology, and employing a production-consumption model. To illustrate the use of the model, one of the most recent and authoritative dictionaries of science and technology published in English, McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, is analyzed. Given that the question has not been explored much by researchers, it is enlightening to explore dictionaries of science and technology as artifacts of scientific and technical communication that play an important role in creating and stabilizing scientific and technical knowledge.ģThe main purpose of this article is to propose a model that may be used to throw light on some of the hidden mechanisms behind the power of dictionaries of science and technology. As such, it is important to make visible the hidden mechanisms of this process of transformation. Moreover, because dictionaries are often viewed as mundane documents, their power is invisible, which makes them even stronger.ĢThe ability to transform knowledge into value has been identified as one of the most important social functions of scientific and technical communication (Longo, 2000: xi). In this way, dictionaries have been dictating what knowledge may be considered as valuable and trustworthy. For centuries, the knowledge found in dictionaries has been considered to be more authoritative and “valuable” than the knowledge not referenced by these works. Dictionaries in general, and dictionaries of science and technology in particular, are key objects of study since they exercise power by assigning value to knowledge. 1Dictionaries of science and technology define scientific and technical terms for a variety of audiences and are a genre widely used in communicating on scientific and technical topics.
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