| Abstract: |
Traditional bilingual dictionaries cannot adequately take into account different, often mutually exclusive, user needs. The treatment of phraseologies in the microstructure of a bilingual dictionary also poses problems for the user: it is not straightforward to match a phraseologism to a headword and too little usage information is usually provided. In addition, all the desirable information cannot fit into a general bilingual dictionary and therefore tends to be seperated off in special syntagmatic and paradigmatic bilingual dictionaries.
Innovative electronic hypertext dictionaries can help solve some of the problems of traditional bilingual dictionaries. An approach is described here in which a type-inclusive bi-directional and bi-functional online-dictionary can be created. Based on an analysis of various print dictionaries for German/Polish, a detailed structure is defined and illustrated in examples. During the analysis of the articles from the print-dictionaries a large amount of different information types (node types) and relation between them (link types) were defined. According to the data structure, a hypertext scheme is modelled which forms the basis of the new electronic dictionary. This model supports the concept of the user profile, that is, it should make it possible to generate tailor-made articles "on demand" from a centrally stored database according to the mother-tongue of the user (direction) and the relevant usage situation (function). Also discussed are the navigation mechanisms for browsing and requests to the search engine of the planned dictionary.
Some pointers to the technical implementation and as yet unresolved problems follow. The "outlook" summarises the pedagogical advantages which can be expected from the new hypertext-based bilingual dictionaries of the future. |