Who Needs a Thematic Dictionary “for All Occasions” Today? A Compiler’s Notes

This study delivers the experience of compiling a polythematic bilingual dictionary (Shamil Khairov and John Dunn. Russian For All Occasions. A Russian-English Dictionary of Collocations and Expressions. Routledge, 2019, 711 pp.) and discusses its potential for practical teaching and learning. The aim of the dictionary is to help learners overcome their ‘linguistic muteness’: namely, their inability to effectively communicate due to a lack of a repertoire of conventional phrases (communicative fragments) for typical topics and situations. Thus, the vast majority of entries in the book (10.000 in total) consist predominantly of micro contexts, or, in other words, communicative fragments as exemplified in the following entries from the section titled Warfare: Им нужна́ была́ ма́ ленькая победоно́ сная война́ . They needed a small victorious war. В я́ дерной войне́ не бу́ дет победи́ теля. There can be no winners in a nuclear war. Они́ веду́ т гибри́ дную войну́ . They are engaged in hybrid warfare. The main methodological problem – how to ‘dissect’ life into topics and categories while preserving the usability of the final product – was resolved by breaking down the content into four larger units: (I) the person and the family; (II) culture, technology and daily life; (III) society; and (IV) the natural world. This approach proved particularly effective in teaching a “Russian for Social Scientists” course aimed at postgraduate students of Central and East European Studies. In their research, these students focus on many topics reflected in our dictionary, such as people’s rights and freedoms, opposition and protesting, civil society, state structures, international conflicts, combatting extremism and terrorism, warfare, demographics, housing, religion, economics and finance, and crime and corruption. The conclusion discusses the perspectives of converting its content into a modern learning resource, like series of interactive tests on translation, audio support, exercises on the entries’ variability, or further development of the selected sections by students using the media and artificial intelligence depending on their research subjects.