Ronald Moe Dictionary Development Program 1

I have a toolbox full of all sorts of tools. The other day I needed to pound a nail, but couldn’t find my hammer. I eventually got the job done, but it would have been so much easier with a hammer and a lot easier on my thumb. What would a carpenter do without his hammer and saw, or an artist without his brush, or a shepherd without his staff? One of the basic tools of a translator is a dictionary. Many translators have gotten the job done without one, but those who have them use them all the time.1 A good dictionary can be used for language learning, phonological analysis, interlinearization of texts, translation, and so much more. A good thesaurus can suggest alternate wordings and enrich the vocabulary of the translation. Not only will a dictionary make a profound impact on a project, but in many cases it is the most important single contribution we can make to the linguistic world. Dictionaries are also the only linguistic descriptions that are popular with the general public. Up until now the time and effort involved in compiling a dictionary was so great that progress was agonizingly slow. Most of us translate with a small dictionary of very limited usefulness. Others give it up as not worth the bother. Some wait to produce a dictionary until after the translation is done, when it is too late to be of help! But now it is possible to produce a massive, semantically classified dictionary at the beginning of the project, so that it can be used throughout the project. Since