The Challenges of Creating a Bilingual (English-Italian) E-Dictionary of Sports and Games Terminology

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The Challenges of Creating a Bilingual (English-Italian) E-Dictionary of Sports and Games Terminology

Introduction
Sports and games are pervasive in our society both as competitive and as recreational activities.In some way or another, they affect us all, either because we engage in certain disciplines, professionally or amateurly, or simply because we are exposed to mega-sport events such as the Football World Cup, the Olympic Games and a number of other minor contests.Regardless of whether we are active participants or passive spectators, we all need, in different degrees, to use or at least understand the language of sports and games as it appears in the press, on social media and on TV.
Due to the presence of terminology, this may not always be an easy feat.In addition, as new disciplines emerge and grow (some examples are bouldering, padel, parkour, to mention just a few), languages constantly incorporate new words.English is a generous 'donor' of sports terminology to other languages.This is due, on the one hand, to its established lingua franca role also in sports events, which bring together athletes, teams and coaches from different countries.On the other hand, it is also true that many sports and games originate(d) in English-speaking environments before being exported to other parts of the world (Note 1).Hence, the abundance of anglicisms related to sports and games in the world's languages.
In the case of Italian, the introduction of English loanwords is also facilitated by an "open attitude of Italian society to Anglo-American culture, and the absence of any purist language policy as far as lexical borrowing is concerned" (Pulcini, 2008, p. 140).This has produced the co-existence of certain anglicisms with their Italian counterparts (e.g., En. coach and It. allenatore, En. corner and It. calcio d'angolo, etc.), but also the input of terminology which is now fully integrated in Italian (e.g., derby in football, K.O. in boxing; the names of various disciplines, such as kickboxing, bungee jumping, standup paddleboarding, and so forth) (Note 2).
Despite the pervasiveness of the language of sports and games, which may also include jargon and technical terms, dictionaries in this field do not abound or they tend to give prominence to the most popular sports.The 2000s, for instance, have seen the appearance of several dictionaries of football in multilingual editions (Pons, 2006;Yıldırım, 2006;Taborek, 2020), while the ones covering other disciplines are still few; some of them were published on the occasion of important events, such as the Olympic Games (Wehlen, 1976), the multi-sport European Championships (Sirges, 1980) or the various World Cups (Binder & Brasse, 1998).
This paper examines the existing bilingual English-Italian dictionaries of sports and games terminology and discusses the challenges of updating them, not just in terms of their contents but also in their form.It is indeed an undeniable fact that lexicographic resources need to be more practical in today's mobile society (Fuertes Olivera, 2018;Jackson, 2018) and be transformed into multimodal digital products in order to be more easily accessible and satisfy the modern user's needs.Section 2 illustrates the features of the two main English-Italian dictionaries in this area, namely Bonanno's (1988) Dizionario dello Sport e di Medicina Sportiva and Ragazzini's (1998) Dizionario dello Sport, but also examines some sections of Cambridge Word Routes -Dizionario Tematico dell 'Inglese Contemporaneo (1995), which specifically address some sports disciplines.Section 3 provides an overview of minor online lexicographic resources, while section 4 proposes an improved English-Italian e-dictionary entry and exemplifies the sort of features that modern online lexicographic resources should have in order to be of practical use among translators, language learners and anyone interested in the micro-language of sports and games in English and Italian for professional, business or more personal purposes.Section 5 concludes the paper with some final considerations and a brief discussion on the future of lexicography.

Bilingual English-Italian Dictionaries of Sports and Games Terminology
The 2000s have not seen the publication of the revised editions of the two main bilingual English-Italian dictionaries mentioned above, which have remained in paper form and have not even been made available on CD-ROM.In addition, Ragazzini (1998) is now out of print and no longer easily found.Bonanno (1988) is, instead, still published today despite its being an older dictionary.Similarly, Cambridge Word Routes -Dizionario Tematico dell 'Inglese Contemporaneo (1995) has not been updated, is not in electronic format, but is still available for purchase.(Bonanno, 1988) This dictionary was compiled by an Italian secondary school teacher of English with the aim of contributing "to the understanding of English or American terms of many sports, even those not well known or practiced in our country" (Note 3).Therefore, it mainly targets Italian speakers, even though it is not unidirectional because it contains two sections with word lists and translation equivalents in both Italian and English.The merit of the work, which covers 63 disciplines and includes over 20,000 terms, lies in the fact that it always endeavors to provide the Italian counterpart or at least an explanation of the English terms even when they have made their way into Italian (e.g., skateboard 'monopattino').The aim is to provide an incentive not to resort too frequently and casually to anglicisms that may be unclear to those unfamiliar with the English language and which refer to concepts that can be perfectly expressed in Italian too.An attempt has been made to list the actual terms used by specialists in the various disciplines: the author gathered materials from different sports federations, such as C.O.N.I. (Italian National Olympic Committee), as well as from the British Council and the cultural adviser to the Quebec delegation in Italy.The dictionary, however, is not based on a real corpus, but just informed by a variety of authentic data.Some lemmas are accompanied by black and white drawings that appear either on the right or left margin of the page or in the body of the entries.It is not clear, though, what the rationale behind the use of illustrations is.While some drawings are indeed justified because they describe complex notions, such as certain procedures and techniques, e.g. the five-step delivery mode in bowling, others simply represent objects, e.g. a baseball bat, a baseball ball, etc., and are not really necessary for comprehension.They only seem to have a sort of decorative function.

Dizionario dello Sport e di Medicina Sportiva
The main shortcoming of the dictionary is that the lemmas do not come with proper definitions, phonetic transcriptions or example sentences, but simply with their equivalents in English or Italian (Table 1), which are not of much help if one needs more than just a translation.Since terms are not presented in their context of use, the work looks more like a glossary than a real dictionary.
Table 1.Example of dictionary entry in Bonanno (1988) pall-mall, s., pallamaglio pan, s., (vela), aggottatoio Knowing that pall-mall corresponds to 'pallamaglio' in Italian does not really explain what the discipline consists of (Note 4).Similarly, neither pan nor 'aggottatoio' in the language of sailing are transparent unless one is already familiar with one of the two terms and is just looking for its counterpart in the other language (Note 5).This is where the use of an illustration would have been particularly useful.In other cases, not only are proper definitions missing, but the explanations provided are also somewhat vague and inaccurate: paddle tennis, for instance, is only generically defined as 'a kind of tennis' ('specie di tennis'), thus failing to distinguish it from other racket sports which also resemble tennis, e.g.squash, ping-pong or badminton.In addition, certain lemmas, which sometimes consist of phrases and fixed expressions (Note 6) are not faithfully reproduced in Italian.Consider, for instance, score (to) the winning goal in the last minute, which could have been literally translated as 'segnare il gol vincente all'ultimo minuto'; the dictionary instead opts for 'segnare il gol vincente in zona Cesarini', which is both culture-bound and stylistically marked.Albeit stable and lexicalized, the Italian expression is very colloquial.It originated as a reference to an Italian-Argentinian footballer, Renato Cesarini, who often scored goals in the last few minutes of a match.Therefore, doing something in 'Cesarini zone', in a wider sense, means that whatever we refer to is happening at the very last moment, before it is too late.
The dictionary never provides any information about style or register, thus failing to address the differences in connotation between the English and Italian terms.This is true not just cross-linguistically, but also within the same language: a case in point are near-synonyms, which are distinguished neither in terms of their subcategorization frame, i.e. by making reference to their syntactic behavior, nor stylistically.The Italian word 'applauso', for instance, is made to correspond to both applause and cheer, but without any examples contrasting them it is impossible for dictionary users to understand whether and to what extent the two English words can be interchangeable.Bonanno (1988)  Lastly, there appears to be a gender bias in the representation of certain disciplines.Gymnastics tends to be associated to women: while women's gymnastics is present as a separate entry, men's gymnastics is not; players are viewed as male by default and the marked form lady player is proposed for Italian 'giocatrice'; the words champion and winner only appear with their masculine counterpart in Italian ('vincitore'), but never in the feminine form ('vincitrice'), which is instead proposed as a translation for defeater.
To begin with, it is more comprehensive because it consists of approximately 50,000 entries covering the most widely practiced sports in Italy and in English-speaking countries (from soccer to baseball, basketball, cricket, field hockey, rugby, tennis, golf, water and winter sports, athletics, horseback riding and equestrianism, motoring, cycling, bowling, combat sports, billiards and many others).In addition, the first part, the English-Italian section, is typically organized as a proper dictionary with the inclusion of nested sub-headwords instead of listing all entries alphabetically as separate lemmas.Tables 2 and 3 show the entry for score, both as a noun and as a verb, in Bonanno (1988) and Ragazzini (1998), respectively.What is immediately clear is that the latter is much more detailed (even without including score again, score against, score off, score on and score up, which are listed separately) and that the arrangement of the entry follows the standards of modern lexicography.Therefore, it does not present itself as a mere glossary of terms as in the case of Bonanno (1988).We can observe that in Ragazzini (1998) alphabetical order only applies to headwords and compounds, while phrases are embedded under the main lemma entries.By contrast, headwords, compounds as well as phrases are listed separately in Bonanno (1988).Not only does Ragazzini (1998) provide the Italian equivalents of the English terms, but on several occasions it also includes further information (e.g. to score a run, (baseball) realizzare un 'run'; fare un punto con un 'home run'; segnare un punto facendo il giro completo del campo fino alla casa base) (Note 7) and explanations (e.g., In cricket, a run is scored whenever the two batsmen exchange their wicket positions on hit or passed balls without either being out) accompanied by their translation (nel cricket, si segna un 'run' ogni volta che i due battitori fanno la corsa per il cambio di wicket dopo che la palla è stata battuta ovvero passata, purché nessuno dei due si trovi fuori dalla zona (di norma un punto va a entrambi)).
The second part of the dictionary, the Italian-English section, resembles Bonanno's (1988) structure, because it is less detailed and simply works as a glossary.Some entries are more complete than others, but when phrases are incorporated in the entries they only consist of basic ones.Longer expressions are listed separately.Consider, for instance, the rather concise entry for 'segnare', which only appears with the equivalent English verbs related to various disciplines (Table 4).This lemma is then followed by 88 distinct entries with different degrees of complexity, e.g.segnare agevolmente (calcio, ecc.) to score freely; segnare con un'angolazione perfetta (calcio, ecc.) to score with a perfect angle/diagonal shot; segnare con un secco tiro ricurvo piazzando il pallone sull'interno del primo palo (calcio) to hook sharply inside the near post, etc.Interestingly, the expression segnare il gol della vittoria in zona Cesarini is present in Ragazzini (1998) too, although in the English-Italian section it appears alongside segnare all'ultimo minuto as the equivalent of to score (the winning goal/a winner) in the last minute.Not even Ragazzini (1998) however makes reference to the colloquial use of the expression.
The weaknesses of this dictionary reside in the fact that it is not corpus-based, that it does not systematically provide the pronunciation of words and that no illustrations are included.Semantically related items are not clearly disambiguated either.If we consider the pair of near-synonyms discussed above, i.e. cheer and applause, what emerges in Ragazzini (1998) is that cheer as a noun has a richer semantic contour (i.e., it also has the sense of 'acclamation' and 'incitement' in addition to indicating the 'shouts' of people cheering) than its Latinate counterpart applause (Table 5).However, they appear to be completely interchangeable in the examples provided: not only can we say to receive much applause, but also to receive many cheers; similarly, the sentence The cheers of the crowd on the terraces went sky-high could be rephrased as The applause of the crowd… without significantly altering the meaning.In other words, the different meaning nuances and the limits of substitutability of the two words are not clearly presented.Although Ragazzini (1998) was published ten years later than Bonanno (1988), it does not show attention to representing genders equally in its entries either: certain words or expressions, such as winner, conqueror and top finisher for instance, are still only translated with their masculine forms, i.e. 'vincitore', 'conquistatore' and 'primo arrivato', respectively.It has become common practice in modern dictionaries instead to include both sexes (Note 8).

Cambridge Word Routes -Dizionario Tematico dell'Inglese Contemporaneo (1995)
Although this is not an ESP dictionary and is mainly aimed at Italian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, it includes several thematic sections about sport and games.It is thus worth examining how it is internally organized and in what way it differs from the other two resources examined above.From a macrostructural perspective, it is similar to both Bonanno (1988) and Ragazzini (1998), because it also consists of a more detailed English-Italian first part and of a second section with just two lists of alphabetically ordered words in English and Italian.
The first word group related to sport is a general one that does not include vocabulary about any discipline in particular (it lists words such as play, exercise, score, competition, pitch, field, ground, and so forth), while the following ones cover ball sports, athletics, water sports, gymnasium sports, outdoor sports, target sports and equestrian sports.They are followed by some other general sections subsuming vocabulary related to the topic of 'success', 'failure', 'reward', 'strength', etc.The dictionary includes a separate section on games with rather basic vocabulary (e.g., play, toy, quiz, cards and so on).
Since this dictionary is meant to be used in the context of language teaching/learning, many grammatical notes are included in the entries, especially when there is a difference in use between a certain English word/expression and its Italian counterpart.The entry for walk in the equestrian sports section (Table 6), for instance, shows that the verb in English may also be used transitively (Note 9), a possibility that is ruled out in Italian.Although the various sport sections include only essential vocabulary, they sometimes entail encyclopedic components.The entry for rounders, for instance, explains what sort of game it is and where it is played (Table 7).Nevertheless, the information provided is often not sufficient to understand what exactly is being indicated, especially when, as in this case, there is no corresponding term in Italian (Note 10) and no illustrations are provided.Interestingly, some entries contain information about style: ping-pong is defined as "rather informal, not used in sports competitions".However, the fact that this discipline is essentially the same as table tennis, which is also present in the section on racket sports, is not mentioned.This is because there are no section-internal references.
All the lemmas included in the various sections also appear in the two indices at the end of the volume, together with IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols to help learners with correct British English pronunciation.
The didactic orientation of the dictionary is also reflected in the use of drawings illustrating some of the entries, albeit rather simply and not systematically.

Online Glossaries of Sports and Games Terms
The web abounds with glossaries of sports and games terms.Many of them are monolingual English resources that include terminology related to specific disciplines.They tend to appear in blogs, on the webpages of language schools or translation agencies and present different degrees of accuracy and comprehensiveness.It is often not possible to verify the competence of those who created them or to know what criteria were followed for the selection of the terms.The main feature of most online glossaries resides in the fact that they are essentially word lists, sometimes even without proper definitions or usage examples (Note 11).In other cases, however, they can be more detailed and include explanations, images and video clips (Note 12).Interesting resources may also be found on the webpages of amateur or professional sports organizations.The National Collegiate Athletic Association in the USA, for instance, has online multimodal glossaries of the various sports played across the country, in Puerto Rico and Canada: the women's volleyball section, just to make an example, contains a dictionary and a list of common terms accompanied by realistic images, animations, illustration videos and clips.
The National Hockey League also has a page dedicated to key hockey terms, even though it is quite static and not enriched with multimodal features (Note 13).Similarly, several other sports associations, organizations and clubs have developed more or less exhaustive databases with relevant terminology for a certain area.
Online bilingual English-Italian glossaries are few and typically include only discipline-specific terms.Most of them have an amateur character and were not created by language experts or lexicographers.An example is the glossary of dressage, compiled by someone with an interest in equestrianism (Note 14).Other resources can be found on the webpage of an Italian freelance translator (Note 15) which, among other things, contains links to bilingual as well as multilingual glossaries of terms pertaining to the various sports disciplines played during the Olympic games of 2012 and 2016.Another interesting platform is the Italian Language and Culture blog FluentU, which has a sports section with essential vocabulary 'for athletes and fans' (Note 16).Not only are the most popular sports listed, but there is also a section with the recurrent phrases and sentences used to speak about sport, accompanied by audio files.Since the latter provide the pronunciation of words and expressions only in Italian, it is evident that the target audience are prevalently native English speakers, although Italian users and learners of English may also benefit from them.A similar but richer website is that of Berlitz USA, which lists '149 fun sports terms in Italian to help you kick language goals' (Note 17), grouped according to the various types of disciplines, i.e. outdoor sports, water sports, indoor sports, etc., and accompanied by lists of sports-related vocabulary, such as verbs indicating sports actions (e.g., to shoot, to dribble, to dunk) and other generic words (e.g., athlete, team, coach).Because Berlitz is a language instruction company, with a focus to develop conversational skills and cultural awareness, this section of the website also includes example conversations in Italian about sports-related topics and whilst playing sports, in addition to information about the Italian sports habits and traditions.
Lastly, recent years have seen the emergence of video glossaries too, such as the one made available by Collins Dictionary (Note 18), which however present very basic vocabulary and are meant to be used in the context of initial language teaching/learning.Due to their simplicity, they cannot be treated as proper lexicographic resources.

Creating a Bilingual English-Italian E-Dictionary of Sports and Games
The overview of the existing bilingual English-Italian resources conducted above has evidenced that there is room for improvement in this area of ESP lexicography.The main shortcoming of sports and games lexicography today, at least for the English-Italian language pair, is that there exists no complete or updated dictionary in electronic form.The creation of such e-dictionary undoubtedly represents a challenge as users now expect to find an added value in dictionaries compared to what is already available on the web.Artificial intelligence can indeed provide very accurate translations of words, phrases and even whole texts, leading to the perception that dictionaries are now less necessary than in the past.Modern lexicographers thus need to think of ways to enrich dictionaries with features that justify resorting to them instead of performing ad-hoc online searches.
In this section, a model e-dictionary entry is presented taking as an example the word padel, indicating a new sports discipline that has become very popular in the past few years.
Let us start by considering what the initial part of the entry could be like.Following the recent trends of online dictionaries, it would make sense to include not just the phonetic transcription of the lemma, but also audio clips to listen to its pronunciation.This is particularly relevant when there is a difference across varieties of English: in padel the stress falls on the first syllable in British and Australian English (/'padl/ or /'paed(ə)l/), but also on the second syllable in American English (/pə'dɛl/).Short clips can be found on YouTube presenting the pronunciation peculiarities of certain words (Note 19).
The main advantage that e-lexicography offers is the possibility to incorporate hyperlinks within dictionary entries that allow us to have access to a plethora of information (Hargraves, 2020), which for obvious reasons of space could not be included in paper dictionaries.In addition to audio and video files for pronunciation lookups (Figure 1), the lemma padel may be associated to the broader category of 'racket sports' by means of a gloss linked to a Wikipedia page, for instance, where more details about the discipline can be found.Hyperlinks would have to be active not just by clicking on them, thus redirecting users to external pages, but also by simply hovering over them with the mouse (Figure 2).This option should allow the display of images and pop-up windows partially showing the contents of external resources.
The defini (and poten eventually Italian-spe The phrase to reliable provided a produce a about the t more' sec e-dictionar  as an etired ually refers to pin bowling and is practiced everywhere and by everyone.Another example is horse racing in Italy, where it also comprises certain traditional games, such as the Palio race in Siena, which is not just a sports competition, but rather a year-long event that is very much part of the local Tuscan culture.These are important facts that need to be addressed for a better understanding of what is behind a term.

Conclusions
The bilingual English-Italian dictionaries of sports and games terminology currently available on the market are only in paper form; they have not been recently updated and are thus rather out of date.More dynamicity and an electronic format in line with modern lexicography are called for.The present paper has tentatively presented a possible improved e-dictionary entry showing the kind of features that need to be present in order to enrich users' browsing experience and make it effective.The difficulties of creating a multimodal and multimedial entry have also been discussed.They mainly concern the availability of authentic materials and having to tackle copyright issues.
In an era where the Internet offers an astonishing abundance of resources, dictionaries necessarily need to incorporate rapidly accessible information all on the same page that would otherwise have to be retrieved with multiple searches.This should be the main strength of e-lexicography today.The future holds both challenges and promises in this field.While on the one hand artificial intelligence is often used as an alternative to dictionaries, it could also help lexicographers to create dictionary entries more rapidly.AI-generated entries can indeed be produced using ChatGPT.The path to replacing human labor with automatic process, however, is still unclear.It seems plausible to say that some form of human intervention and post-editing will continue to be necessary in the coming years, at least to avoid plagiarism and copyright infringement.

Notes
Note 1.The modern game of tennis originated in England in the 19 th century as lawn tennis; rugby was born in the city of Rugby, Warwickshire in the first decades of the same century; rowing started on the river Thames in London in the same period, etc.
Note 2. While in some cases anglicisms remain unchanged in Italian (e.g., cricket, polo, tennis), there are also several instances of modifications (e.g., snowboarding may be referred to as 'snow' as in "Non scio ma faccio snow", i.e.I don't ski, but I snowboard), which sometimes also produce false anglicisms (e.g., the use of 'basket' to indicate basketball).See Furiassi and Gottlieb (2015) for an in-depth examination of pseudo-English.
Note 3.This is my translation of a paragraph in the 'Presentation' section.
Note 4.Although bilingual dictionaries are prevalently repositories of words with their translations, the addition of some encyclopedic information is useful to facilitate comprehension and to enrich what are otherwise rather sterile entries.
Note 5.This may be the case of medical terminology, e.g.It. frattura composta, En. compound fracture, whose definitions would be unnecessary for sports doctors.
Note 6. Incidentally, this dictionary lists all the items alphabetically, with no nesting, thus avoiding textual condensation and facilitating accessibility.At the same time, however, such procedure deviates from the standard way of organizing lemma entries in dictionaries and it is perceived as a rather amateur lexicographic technique.
also presents some ambiguities in the indication of the sport provided in brackets after each term.It is not clear, for instance, what discipline the abbreviated form 'tiro' refers to, because it could be either archery ('tiro con l'arco') or shooting ('tiro a segno/volo').This has implications for the comprehension of certain lemmas.If we consider back of blade, which is associated to 'tiro', it cannot be determined what it stands for; its Italian counterpart ('costola') too is somewhat vague due to its polysemic nature.Most probably, back of blade indicates the part of the bow that faces the archer when the bow is held in shooting position, but it may also indicate a part of the weapon used in sabre, a discipline of modern fencing.It is also interesting to observe that the dictionary omits the definite article (back of the blade), thus causing a potential problem for the correct use of the term.

cricket a run is scored whenever the two batsmen exchange their wicket positions on hit or passed balls without either being out, nel
cricket si segna un 'run' ogni volta che i due battitori fanno la corsa per il cambio di wicket dopo che la palla è stata battuta ovvero è passata, purché nessuno dei due si trovi fuori dalla sua zona (di norma un punto va a entrambi ) (calcio, ecc.) to s. the (o one's) second goal (o to s. one's second), raddoppiare: England have scored their second , l'Inghilterra ha raddoppiato (nelle corse) to s. a solo win , arrivare primo (al traguardo) da solo to s. a success, ottenere (o r iportare) un successo (calcio, ecc.) to s. a teammate , mettere un compagno in condizione di segnare (rugby) to s. a try, segnare (o realizzare) una meta; andare in meta (facendo 4 punti) (calcio, ecc.) to s. twice (o to s. two goals), segnare due gol; segnare due volte; fare una doppietta to s. a win, ottenere una vittoria; vincere (calcio) to s. the winning goal (o a winner) in the last minute, segnare il gol della vittoria (o risolvere la partita) in zona Cesarini (calcio) to s. a win with a header, segnare di testa; incornare in gol (fam. ) (hockey g.) to s. with an open cage, segnare a porta vuota (calcio, ecc.) to s. with an open goal, segnare a porta vuota (o a portiere battuto) (di una squadra) to be able to s., riuscire a segnare; arrivare al gol: At long last we were able to s., finalmente siamo arrivati al gol not to be able to s., non riuscire a trovare la strada del gol (calcio) They've scored somehow, c'è scappato il golletto.

Table 4 .
Ragazzini (1998)re' inRagazzini (1998)segnare (un nome, ecc.) to put down; to write down: (tenere segnati i punti) to mark; to keep (the score); to score; to tally; (fare: punti) to score; to score up; to take;(baseball, basket, cricket, hockey, polo, tennis, ecc.)(colpi, punti) to hit, to shoot; to play;(calcio, ecc.)to deliver; to notch (anche to notch up); to prod home; to put in; to realize; to score; to kick a goal; to put the ball home; to claim; to get a goal; to hit a goal; to make a hit; to run in; to score a hit; to strike a goal; to shoot; to kick; to kick the ball in; to kick in; (trasformare) to convert; (insaccare) to net; (hockey g.) to net, to net the puck; (indicare) to point.