Government Policy and the Planning and Production of Bilingual Dictionaries: the Dutch Approach as a Case in Point.

In 1993 the Ministers of Education in the Netherlands and Flanders decided to install a binational committee of experts in order to co-ordinate, streamline, improve and stimulate the production of bilingual dictionaries and lexical databases with Dutch as a source or target language. This committee, called Commissie voor Lexicografische Vertaalvoorzieningen (Committee for Interlingual Lexicographical Resources) or CLVV, has, under the presidency of W. Martin, set up Action Plans involving some twenty dictionary projects which have been finished or are nearly finished by now. In this article the general policy lines of the CLVV are presented next to the criteria for the selection of language pairs, the infrastructure used, the results obtained and the lessons to be drawn from this 'Dutch' approach. The article also serves as a framework in which to situate the articles that follow. © 2007 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved