A multilingual matter: Sinclair and the bilingual dictionary

Combining direct contribution and wider influence, John Sinclair stimulated a massive sea change in lexicography with the introduction of large reference corpora as the principal source of data. His major direct contribution was through the use of corpora in monolingual learners dictionaries, but his interest in language inevitably led him on to look at multilingual matters; even though he was never directly involved in traditional bilingual lexicography. This paper shows how Sinclairs contribution through work on translation equivalence led on to the series of highly innovative bilingual Bridge dictionaries. It also tries to gauge his wider influence in the field of bilingual lexicography.