There are 4 fresh dictionaries on my hard drive right now, and it’s one of my jobs to get them ready for publication.
What does that entail? Well, it depends on the dictionary.
Do I speak all the languages involved? No. In fact, I only speak 1 of the 4 fluently.
So where do I start? Mostly, with counting.
- Dictionary A: Bilingual. Task: Print Publication from MS Word document. 179 pages, 3526 lemmas, some editing required. Estimated 3 days of work. Difficulty level: Novice.
- Dictionary B: Bilingual. Task: Print Publication from MS Word document. 808 pages, 17500 lemmas, very little editing required. Estimated 5 days of work. Difficulty level: Beginner.
- Dictionary C: Monolingual. Task: Digitisation for Online publication from print PDF, estimated 20 days of work processing the files. Difficulty level: Intermediate
- Dictionary D: Bilingual. Task: Completion of digitisation of Indigenous Language section using dictionary software, addition of 131 missing lemmas, insertion of 4 lemma groups, reversal to create English side, manual transfer of information for over 6000 individual lemmas to the English side, then editing and layout. Estimated infinite eons of time, mostly crying. Difficulty level: Hellish
A makes me a little sad, because it’s more like a wordlist. B makes me very happy, because it is a comprehensive dictionary that is the first in this language published in SA. C is donkey-work, but I like feeling like I’ll have digitised something completely, for posterity, by the end of this.
And D? D wakes me screaming in the small hours. It is a a complex thing, certainly, and it is the first dictionary I have ever worked on using proprietary software. But it has also been well and truly rogered by all those who worked on it before we got hold of it. It was designed to make sense only to its original maker, and try as I might all I can do is create a facsimile (without user protections and obscure Lua scripts) and continue on my way. But that way is dark, and there are many many miles to go.
So if you’re ever wondering what work goes into finally producing a dictionary that you can use, whether it’s online or physical, this should give you some of an idea.
And if I appear a little fractious, it’s probably Dictionary D that’s making me lose my mind.
uMabhengwane 