An investigation into students' perception of utilizing online dictionaries in translation interpretation
The Digital Revolution can be fairly considered to have shifted the paradigm in lexicology and lexicography. It has opened up new ways of exploring and representing the structure of the lexicon, testing diverse theories of word semantics, and compiling both manually and automatically ever larger and richer resources that reflect multiple dimensions of meaning and lexical organization based on solid empirical data (Gala N, Zock M. 2013) This digital era has witnessed the invention of electronic dictionaries, including both L1 L2 and L2 L2 ones. This empirical study aimed at shedding light on how tertiary students, who studied English at Vietnam universities, including Nguyen Tat Thanh University and Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, employed the advantages that computerized dictionaries enjoyed over the paper based, traditional forerunners. To be specific, the concentration of this research was on students' preference for specific online dictionaries, their strategies of exploiting this unlimited resource of lexical meanings, as well as the obstacles they still had to encounter; therefore, plausible solutions could be suggested in order to assist both students and instructors in using online dictionaries more effectively and productively. The paper also concluded that the essence of a language or online dictionary would be rapidly developed because it would meet a fundamental human need: learn a language to understand more the culture as well as the cognition.