| Abstract |
A new project sponsored by a dictionary publisher in South Africa is presented. The aim is to compile fully-corpus-based bidirectional bilingual dictionaries, with in each case one of the nine official Bantu languages and South African English as treated language pairs. As a trial, two small sample dictionaries, one focussing on Northern Sotho, the other on Zulu, were produced through a team effort, catering for mother-tongue speaker input, a linguistics check, as well as an attempt at being lexicographically sound. Among the outcomes of the study is the notion that, in order to honour the reversibility principle, some complexity and especially ingenuity in the presentation of the equivalents is required wherever single- or multi-words in one language do not map on single- or multi-words in another language. In order to contain the paradigmatic explosion of possibilities in such cases, the use of 'grammatical formulas' in the microstructure is suggested. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX06-064,
author = {Gilles-Maurice de Schryver},
title = {Compiling Modem Bilingual Dictionaries for Bantu Languages: Case studies for Northern Sotho and Zulu },
pages = {515-525},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2006},
month = {sep},
date = {6-9},
address = {Torino, Italy},
editor = {Elisa Corino, Carla Marello, Cristina Onesti},
publisher = {Edizioni dell'Orso},
isbn = {88-7694-918-6},
} |
