A new Chinese-English Dictionary of Science and Technology is expected to become a "must-have" desktop reference for bilingual users looking for correct language equivalents.

Published by the National Defence Industry Press, the dictionary contains 20 million words in 80,000 entries.

It is a result of 15 years of arduous work by more than 50 Chinese experts and scholars, said its editor-in-chief Sun Fuchu.

The massive dictionary is comprehensive and interdisciplinary. It covers both basic theoretical disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology; and disciplines of applied technology, according to Sun.

Also included in the dictionary are vocabulary items, which have emerged recently in various fields of science and technology, such as nanotechnology, gene engineering, information technology and robotics, Sun said.

Unlike conventional dictionaries, the Chinese-English Dictionary of Science and Technology does not arrange phrases in alphabetical order, but rather groups entries according to meaning and usage - words with related meanings appear together.

"Those users for whom Chinese is a foreign language may find the dictionary helpful both in learning Chinese language and culture, and in communicating with Chinese people," Sun said.

The dictionary will give Chinese users assistance in writing academic books, research papers, technical manuals, trade contracts and other business documents in English or translating them into English, he said.

Sun, a senior professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University, said the dictionary was compiled based on decades of experience in teaching English to students of science and technology at the Beijing-based university and in helping research and teaching faculty to overcome numerous obstacles in using English in their work.

To ensure the authenticity of the examples used in the dictionary, scholars involved in the compilation project have built up a body of English words by collecting hundreds of thousands of example sentences from books and journals written in English, together with the Chinese version of each, according to Sun.

The dictionary is a sister publication to the 1989 edition of the award-winning English-Chinese Dictionary of Science and Technology, also published by the National Defence Industry Press.

That edition has already had 2 million copies printed.

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