Customer Reviews

The Oxford English-Hindi Dictionary

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I just have to clarify some aspects of this book. Since it has been designed to help people whose mother tongue is Hindi learn English, it does translate many words from English to Hindi. However, often there are rather explanations of the English terms IN Hindi, while many words do not have the requisite English-to-Hindi direct translation (one word to one word) one would expect from such a dictionary. Further more, the words which are directly translated, do NOT contain information on their gender in Hindi (again, it is clearly not a bilingual dictionary and not a "companion" to the Hindi-English dictionary by R.S. McGregor). Still, the book has helped me a lot in learning Hindi's written language.

The reason why this book does not offer many one-word translations of English words, is that they simply do not exist in Hindi. As a native speaker with full proficiency in Hindi (but ONLY the oral language, hence trying to learn the written language), I can affirm that fact. A lot of words relating to Western concepts do not have equivalents in Indian culture, and therefore no real equivalents.

This book does give some colourful and generally humorous translations of concepts which are quite alien in India - for instance pizza (not the best example I know..) is translated as "a round piece of dough on which one may put tomatos". Quite funny to read those kinds of entries!

An excellent dictionary for those learning English, not so helpful if you want to improve your Hindi. I had expected that this would be the companion volume to the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (R S McGregor) but this is not the case.
Many of the English words are not given equivalents but have their meanings explained in Hindi. To help those learning English there are examples of usage but these are not translated into Hindi.

Nice dictionary but why do they not add some romanised phonetics? It would make it universally appealing and useful.