Collins Cobuild Pocket English-English-Urdu Dictionary

Comprehensive listing of equivalent words in Urdu and English. Also pronunciation hints.

Good book, I gifted this to my kid.

The Collins Cobuild corpus is a respected lexicographical base for this endeavour and it is good to see Urdu included in this series but as usual, the lack of native English speakers in the translation team has led to errors in what should be a bilingual exercise. Errors abound in the translation of even basic items - "invigilator" is translated as "mumtahin" (the word for "examiner" in Urdu) when surely "nigraan-e-imtihan" (~exam supervisor) would be more felicitous. More "cultural" translations cause even greater difficulty with the translation for "Ulster" wide off the mark. Students relying on the Collins brand surely expect something better than this but the Oxford parallel suffers from similar weaknesses, again due to the absence of a bilingual team. Collins would never have done this with their authoritative Collins-Robert French dictionary, it's a shame they've cut corners here. Translations of technical terms cause their usual problems but there's some effort to avoid wholesale transliteration (eg "smartphone") even though for the most part, the easy option of borrowing is relied on. Coverage on the other hand is good and the English entries are clear and well typeset. Unfortunately, the use of the Nastaliq font for Urdu, whilst superficially attractive, means a very small typeface due to the need to accommodate the nature of this script. Much clearer and more legible would have been a simple Naskh font, widely used for Urdu in computer applications/on the web. Adobe Arabic would have been perfect. All in all not bad, but there's major work to be done.

Excellent

So i ordered this "Pocket" dictionary. It arrived extremely fast, i was very pleased with the speed, but when i opened the parcel, this is what emerged. So picture one shows the size of my pocket dictionary next to a large flip folder for A4 paper. But then i opened the dictionary and photos 2 and 3 show exactly what greeted me. What an amazing waste of paper. The whole book is printed like that.