Customer Reviews

Norwegian Dictionary: Norwegian-English, English-Norwegian (Routledge Bilingual Dictionaries)

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This dictionary has many problems, and I recommend finding another one. For starters, it is clearly aimed at Norwegians needing to know about English words. The pronunciations given for headwords are only for the English words (British, at that). If you want to know how to pronounce gjøre, for example, there is no help forthcoming. The definitions have lots of little clues about which meaning you want to choose, but those hints are of course in Norwegian. Genders of Norwegian nouns, forms of irregular adjectives, past tenses of verbs are nowhere in evidence, not in the word's article nor by cross-reference. (Norwegians already know this information.)

It is the grammar section (in between the two translating sections) however that I have the biggest complaints about. Most of what is presented is correct, but the section is swimming with typos and other strange and quirky layout issues. I can live with the amusing English spelling "asterix" (p. 273), or even the misspelled past participle of gjøre (which should read gjort, but appears as gjordt (p. 274). But totally beyond my comprehension are the comparative and superlative adjective forms 'interessantmer' instead of 'mer interessant' and 'interessantmest' instead of 'mest interessant' (p. 279). This serious breach of proofreading is repeated with four different adjectives on that page. It gives one concern about trusting anything else in the dictionary.

Also in the introduction, where abbreviations are expanded, one reads that "US" means "United States (of Amerika)..." and that fl stands for "flertall (majority)" but they obviously meant "plural" in a grammatical sense.

I recommend Einar Haugen's Norwegian English Dictionary and perhaps the Berlitz compact dictionary for going the other way.

Although I did not buy this book from Amazon.com, I must concur with what the other reviewer has written. Quite frankly, this dictionary is substandard, and not worth the paper it's printed on. It is far too biased towards Norwegian users. If you want to translate from Norwegian to English, you'll get very little help from this dictionary. But that's not all. Many common words and phrases are omitted. Want to know how to say Happy Birthday in Norwegian? You won't find the answer in this dictionary! And as the other reviewer has pointed out, much crucial information about Norwegian words such as the past tense of verbs and gender of nouns has been left out. You're supposed to work that out from the grammar section in the middle. Not good enough!

A good bilingual dictionary should be equally helpful to users in both languages. The dictionaries put out by Collins and Oxford (for e.g. French, German and Spanish) are excellent examples. They are models of what a good language dictionary should be. The "Norsk Ordbok" dictionary falls very far short of that standard indeed. If you're translating from English to Norwegian, it's not too bad (though you might get stuck if your text contains "Happy Birthday" or any number of other common words this dictionary forgets about). But if you're translating from Norwegian to English, then forget it!

I've noticed some glitches in the selection of vocabulary, but that's not the main problem for English speakers. It doesn't indicate the gender of the nouns in either the English-Norwegian or the Norwegian-English direction. And you can't speak or write Norwegian unless you know the gender of the nouns. And you can't tell the gender by looking at the word the way you can in Italian. A lesser complaint is that it doesn't mark the tone. Norwegian words have tone. Haugen's dictionary marks the tone. I speak Norwegian, and used this dictionary occasionally, because they have it at the office. I didn't notice that gender was missing for a year until a colleague tried to use it. Wow! No gender! What were they thinking?