利氏漢法辭典的故事

Hungarian Jesuit whose name is known to all China watchers, Fr. Laszlo Ladany (1914-1990), was the founder of "China News Analysis", a newsletter that, for decades, was the most insightful source on the Beijing regime. Another Hungarian Jesuit deserves the same fame as Fr. Ladany. Fr. Eugene Zsamar, who died in 1967, was the instigator of the most daring enterprise in Chinese lexicography attempted by foreigners during this century—an enterprise that started officially in Macao in 1949 and reached its fulfilment fifty two years later.

Fr. Zsamar's dream was to gather a team capable of compiling an encyclopaedic polyglot dictionary in five languages: Hungarian, English, French, Spanish and Latin. Although Jesuits had compiled numberless dictionaries during their 400 hundred-year presence in China, there was a need for a systematic work on every aspect of Chinese language and culture. The initial stage of the project was soon disrupted by the political chaos in China. Father Zsamar took refuge in Macao. In 1949, a French Jesuit, Father Deltour, joined him and enriched the basic research material with some 200 dictionaries or related works that he had brought with him. The first two language teams were Hungarian and French. During the autumn of 1951, the Spanish team was organised. Later on, at the request of Chinese seminaries, a Spanish Father and an Italian became engaged in the compilation of the Latin section. The English team joined last of all, in 1952, when the team had already settled in Taichung, central Taiwan.

Father Zsamar had envisioned a dictionary that would cover the whole of Chinese history and culture. For this reason he selected as a reference all the material included in the three best-known Chinese dictionaries. Together, these three works included about 16,000 single characters and 180,000 compounds. It took two years to categorise all this basic information on cards. With the help of thirty collaborators, they added all the possible translations in French, German, Spanish and Hungarian. This work amounted to an inventory with two million entries. Soon, a French Jesuit, Fr. Yves Raguin, succeeded Fr. Zsamar, whose health was deteriorating, as director of the project. Fr. Raguin was to continue in this capacity until 1996 (he died in December 1998).

Father Zsamar had calculated that, in order to achieve optimal efficiency, every member of the team could translate 300 items a day. This was easier said than done. Most of the characters and compounds had many meanings, some up to twenty and even more. The older dictionaries were consulted to enlarge the body of vocabulary in the field of natural sciences, Chinese literature and modern language. The proofreading took place on a rotating basis. As soon as the French bureau had finished its translation work, it was given to another bureau and if necessary corrections were suggested. Afterwards it was returned to the French bureau. The translation work was then followed by a further revision.

At the same time, the lexicographers were trying to secure funding from different foundations, mostly in the United States, with no success. Nobody wanted to invest money in a project that would end, almost certainly, in failure. Financial difficulties, deaths, the departure of many Jesuits towards other apostolic fields hampered considerably the completion of the project. Soon, the French section was the only one where a sizeable number of Jesuits and collaborators were able to continue the work. The English section was dissolved after the unexpected death of its leader, Father Thomas Caroll, an archaeologist. Having heard that prehistoric artefacts had been found on Lamma Island in Hong Kong, he went there to explore on August 28, 1964. The next day the police found his body on the beach, near a cliff. Most probably he had died of sunstroke.

In 1964, Fr. Raguin created the Taipei Ricci Institute, in order to give an institutional basis to the dictionary project and to include it in a broader range of research programmes. After a few years, other Ricci Institutes were also established in Paris and San Francisco. During the '70s, medium-sized Chinese-French and Chinese-Spanish dictionaries were published by authors of the Institutes, their material based on selections taken from the archives gathered over the years. However, it was the computer's coming of age that saved the whole project, as it helped to organise and treat the data in a systematic way. Fr. Yves Camus, now Associate Director of the Macau Ricci Institute, was closely involved in this task for more than 15 years by conceiving and organising the first stages in the process of digitizing the data and supervising their circulation between Taipei and Paris. There, more than 200 sinologists revised the material gathered by former generations of Jesuit scholars.

In December 1999, the semantic part of the Dictionary was published in Paris —a Chinese-French dictionary of "single characters", i.e. of the ideograms that constitute the basis of the Chinese language. The study analysed approximately 13,500 characters, including the ancient graphs of 2,000 characters present at the origin of writing—the "oracular" inscriptions found on tortoise shells and oxen's shoulder blades (starting in 1500 B.C.) and the shapes engraved on bronze vessels (Zhou dynasty) The study then presented the successive meanings of the characters given in Classical Books. There exists no equivalent of this work in any European language.

But these 3,600 pages were only the prelude to the magnum opus, the "Grand Ricci", published at the end of 2001. Covering some 200 branches of knowledge (arts, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, finance, law, literature, philosophy, etc.), the Grand Ricci contains all the single characters of the Ricci dictionary of single characters, and 300,000 compound terms and expressions.

An association has been constituted in order to supervise the follow-up of the work (for further information, please go to www.grandricci.org): a shift to the pinyin romanisation system, specialised lexicons, commercial contracts, maintenance of the database, a CD-Rom project, etc.

pdf format Please download this pdf file of a May 2002 article published in the Far Eastern Economic Review for further reading on the Grand Ricci "epic adventure".