Collins: Full Steam Ahead

This article orginally appeared in the Mar-Apr 1993 issue of Language Industry Monitor

While many publishers are taking their first, tentative baby steps into the realm of electronic publishing, British publisher HarperCollins is boldly pushing forward with a second line of online bilingual dictionaries, Collins Series 100. Whereas Collins Online, based on the familiar Collins Gem pocket dictionaries, weighed in at around 40,000 references apiece, the new Series 100 line, which is based on Collins College bilingual paperback dictionaries, pack upwards of 75,000 references including many verbal phrases and idioms, for each of the four bilingual dictionaries offered. The two product lines, originating from different software houses, are quite different in other ways than just dictionary size. On-Line, which was developed by LinguaTech, offers a facility for creating user dictionaries; Series 100 does not. Series 100, developed by and Software, comes with both dos and Windows versions of its lookup software. Under dos, Series 100 seems rather austere compared to the colorful LinguaTech interface.
    In addition to the six bilingual dictionaries available for On-Line, HarperCollins’s Electronic Reference division has also introduced an electronic version of the cobuild Student’s dictionary. As many Language Industry Monitor readers will know, cobuild lexicographers pioneered, among other things, a delightful, unstilted style for entry descriptions. This electronic cobuild is at least two ways better than the paper version: 1) the abbreviations are expanded (why doesn’t everyone in electronic publishing do this? Old lexicographer’s habits seem to die hard) and 2) the cobuild grammatical labels are included in the dictionary, at the very top of the listings, in front of the A’s. If you want to know what a verb with adjunct is, you can find it in a flash. The Student’s cobuild can be used in tandem with other On-Line bilingual dictionaries. A hot-key allows you to jump from an English target word in a bilingual dictionary directly into the cobuild to get a longer description and maybe an example.
    There seems to be an unstoppable flow of new electronic reference products coming from HarperCollins in the coming months: a Windows version of On-Line, a Mac version of Collins 100, and a completely new version of Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus prepared by Reference Software, now part of WordPerfect (see story page 1). Then, sometime this summer, we can look forward to the cobuild cd-rom containing the full edition of the cobuild English Dictionary, Collins cobuild Grammar, and Collins cobuild English Usage. The cobuild cd- rom is being prepared by HarperCollins together with Attica Cybernetics.
    For years, British publishers have far surpassed their American counterparts in addressing the huge English-as-a-Second-Language market. With its growing team of collaborators in the software world, HarperCollins looks leagues ahead of its British colleagues in propelling esl publishing into the electronic domain.

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