Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Síða 56

54 Orð og tunga
4.1 Future Icelandic bilingual dictionaries and the electronic
lexicon
But what is the role of electronic dictionaries in all this? Setting out to
cater for the "L2/passive" requirements of a bifunctional dictionary it
will always be very difficult to know how to restrict the vocabulary
and how to balance its component parts (is there sufficient coverage
of political vocabulary, and is the world of film properly represented,
etc.?). A way to combine the printed book with a larger supportive
database would be to put extra, supportive and potentially the more
complex vocabulary on the Internet. By buying the printed version
of a dictionary, you would perhaps buy automatically the first year's
subscription to the full database of the work, whereas for the second
year, you pay. It sounds to me like something that might appeal to a
publisher.
4.1.1 Dictionaries that are exclusively electronic?
In extension of this option, taking up what I was saying before about
translators, I wonder if it might not be possible soon to provide ac-
cess to highly specialised dictionaries exclusively on the web as well
as to searchable text corpora to help translators in their daily work.
This would certainly remove some of the burden frorn bifunctional
dictionary-making. As pocket computers and wireless systems be-
come more developed and widely available, it is, in addition, easy to
imagine a situation in which dictionaries could be purely electronic
but nonetheless extremely multifunctional. On entering a billingual
lexicon site the user could be invited to continue either as a "school-
level/active" user or a "foreign-language student/passive" or "trans-
lator/Ll" or "translator/L2", and so on, and the interfaces would ad-
apt accordingly; alternatively the user could opt to be presented with
the entire database for each headword. Until such a stage in computer
development is reached, however, I recommend, for bifunctional dic-
tionaries larger than c. 30,000 entries, in the first instance, a printed
dictionary, the range of which can be expanded by additional access to
an auxiliary database. This would be a viable tactic in terms of serving
both "active" and "passive" requirements.