SeLA – a new project on electronic lexicography

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In a cooperation between universities from Germany, South Africa and Namibia, several aspects of electronic lexicography will be the focus of collaborative research, in a new project entitled SeLA – Scientifi c e-Lexicography for Africa. The project is carried out by the Universities of Hildesheim, Stellenbosch and Pretoria, as well as the distance learning University UNISA, University of South Africa (Pretoria), and the University of Namibia based in Windhoek. It involves principal investigators from linguistics (R. H. Gouws, H. Beyer, S. Bosch, D. J. Prinsloo, E. Taljard), information science (T. J. D. Bothma), intercultural communication (S. Schlickau), as well as from computational linguistics (U. Heid) and is coordinated at Universität Hildesheim, Germany, and fi nanced by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), under its programme “Welcome to Africa”, where it is the only project in the domain of philology and computer science among ten newly started German/African partnerships from all fi elds of science. The project started on June 1st, 2012, and will last for three years; it will focus on electronic dictionaries as communication tools, considering in particular the situation in Southern Africa, where support tools for communication between the different language groups and for relating the African languages with English and Afrikaans are needed. Dictionaries that could fulfi ll this purpose should be designed in a user-centered way and be conceived for the electronic medium from the start. The SeLA project is intended to contribute to such developments, but also to provide theoretical and practical insights that may be benefi cial to a wider community of lexicographers dealing with electronic dictionaries. The underlying hypothesis of SeLA is that a combination of theory and practice provides results that can be tested in the framework of e-lexicography. The research is based on a theory-oriented work package which provides the starting point for specifi c case studies and which also serves to summarize and systematize the outcome of these case studies. The project furthermore follows accepted methodology from computer science and information science in defi ning requirements based on user needs, as well as in specifying and implementing corpus-based support technology for dictionary creation and small prototype dictionaries which can be tested together with users. The methodological work, as well as the lexicographic details to be developed in the case studies will be translated into elements of teaching programmes which will be jointly developed between the project partners and tested at different sites, both in Germany and in Southern Africa. In this framework, also German BA and MA students will be active in the project through qualifi cation work, partly carried out in tandem projects, in cooperation with colleagues from the Southern African universities. Finally, SeLA will constantly monitor its own project-internal communication, analyze it from the viewpoint of a discourse-analytic approach to intercultural communication and use the results of such analyses to prepare and optimize intercultural training material for both researchers and students involved in the exchange (S. Schlickau, Institute for Intercultural Communication at Hildesheim University, in cooperation with colleagues from South Africa). In addition, we expect that this training material will in addition contribute documentation for culture-specifi c items to be dealt with in dictionaries.