How „Truly Electronic Dictionaries” of the 21st Century Should Look Like?

The first part of the presentation follows the main points of Atkins (2002) paper on the future of bilingual dictionaries. More than ten years ago she claimed that – besides the still existing printed dictionaries – the future should produce “truly electronic dictionaries” enriched with new types of information. But what sorts of new information have appeared in our dictionaries in the last decade? We try to enumerate the most important features which make today's traditions really different from those of the past. With the help of these features the basic design of our near future's electronic dictionaries is sketched out. Various new aspects must be taken into consideration if the dictionaries of the 21st century are to be better usable than the ones of the previous ages. In the second part of the presentation we show some methods of how new functions of a dictionary appear in the reality. 1. What sorts of new information have appeared in our dictionaries in the last decade? In 1996, at the EURALEX Congress Sue Atkins gave a speech on the future of bilingual dictionaries. This keynote address was published in a festschrift in her honor six years later, followed by a series of other papers about the same topic (Corréard 2002). One of Atkins's claims formalized a general truth, namely “Change is not something that people tend to associate with dictionaries” (Atkins 1996). Electronic dictionaries, however, are part of the fast changing electronic world, thus, in the last decade several new features have appeared in them. In the electronic world it is common sense that hypertext functionality eliminates linear text restrictions and opens the way to new types of information by offering new ways of presenting them. In the dictionary world, the first consequence of being electronic is that there are no space constraints, that is, we don't need to follow the well-known dictionary formats, which is a sort of consequence of the Gutenberg-galaxy. Our dictionaries can be disengaged from the shortcomings of being printed. The entries don't need to follow any order, alphabetic or other, the hits for any query can be sorted according to the actual user needs. There can be alternative ways of presenting information: it is not bound to the nature of the paper. There are a lot of opportunities for user customization: for example, if the user likes the more traditional view of dictionary entries with tilde signs, he or she can see the dictionary content according to this, but if other, non-traditional views are preferred, it can be done without changing the dictionary's internal database representation. There are other new options as well: lexicographers are not obliged to insert various examples into the entries, because of the rapid access to large amounts of lexicographical data in available monoor bilingual corpora showing the actual use of the word or expression in context, with or without translation. There are other consequences of being electronic: e.g. intelligent dictionary production which is an important branch of computational lexicography of the corpus linguistic age. Starting from corpora (“corpus-based lexicography”) many dictionaries have been