Grant-funded Project Nr. 266/2000/A-FG/FF
Final Report

Project title:Special Terminologies in the German-Czech Academic Dictionary
Research leader:Ph.D. Marie Vachková
Co-researcher: Mgr. Jaroslava Kommová; Simona Kompasová; Magda Razímová; Bc. Vendula Cielecká
Period of project:2000-2002
Overall grant:625 000 CZK

Project Results

The project aimed at pending problems regarding the treatment of special terminologies in the large German-Czech academic dictionary. In the first phase of the project, the team quantified and analyzed the terminologies in the Duden Universalwoerterbuch (in the latest editions of the DUW). The results were analyzed from the point of view of centre/periphery, of frequency and the occrurence in the electronic corpora and in the Internet. Afterwards, these terminologies were compared with their treatment in some German-Czech special Dictionaries of terms. The results showed that the terminologies presented in the DUW could not be simply taken over into the German-Czech Academic Dictionary because of their selection (some of the terminologies were not up to date, some were missing, some were not adapted to the needs of the Czech users or to the special German-Czech historical, political and cultural context.
During our work with the way the entries are processed in current German-Czech special dictionaries, many problems have been found (morphological variants, problems with pronounciation and accent, none or inadequate diasystematical markers, too few examples, incomplete information in the Czech part of the entries, too few or no markers etc.).  These results led to development of our own database which was theoretically based on the modern French terminographic literature. The concept of this database was verified during our work on the German-Czech Dictionary of Chemistry Terms with 4 000 entries (author: J. Kommová et al.). During this work we gained important knowledge in the field of the corpus linguistics (working with German corpora as well the Czech National Corpus at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Charles University  in Prague). A parallel German-Czech corpus was created. Three different concordancy programmes were used to study the syntactic aspects of using terms in the language for  special purposes. Then, a number of seminary works was written (e. g.  Verb processing by M. Babinsky; Onymic elements in German and Czech Chemistry Laws and their translations into Czech - S. Kompasova; On collocation in specialized texts - M. Razímová). After the chemical dicitonary was finished, other preliminary works for creating other outputs took place with the help of specialized advisers. This was financed by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (405/00/0055). All works were led by J. Kommová. They have been conceived effectively and so they will proceed in the future: simultaneously, another work  is under way on other terminologies to build smaller outputs which evolve from the chemistry dictionary (basic vocabulary for historians and archivists, mathematicians etc. - using help of students from the 2nd cycle of Germanic Studies), new terms for the large dictionaries are being preapred. Two of our student coworkers intend to continue their work in this field: M. Razímová in the field of corpus linguistics, V. Cielecká is finishing a German - Czech Dictionary of Astronomy Terms (applied for her own grant in 2002).  These results were presented at the symposion in Prague, November 2002 (organized by the main applicant, see the attached leaflet.) J. Kommová and M. Vachková are the authors of a study summing up the experiences of the project. This study ist a part of the prepared Proceedings. The output and methodology have been presented also at the world Germanist conference at the Institute of the German Language in Mannheim in March 2003  on a colloquy dealing with modern lexicographic methods (paper by M. Vachková). Our work on the output helped to clarify many problems which were relevant also for the project of the large dictionary. In this sense, it helped us as a testing material without which we could not build the next database.