Creating Specialised Dictionaries for Foreign Language Learners: A Case Study

Abstract

The paper describes a set of 12 specialised Estonian-Russian dictionaries for Russian schools, motivated by the socio-cultural context in Estonia that favours Russian-speaking people learning Estonian. The dictionaries are of L1-L1-L2 type and include terms, their main inflectional forms, explanations and the Russian translation of the term. To make the dictionaries as comprehensible as possible, the rules for clear writing were followed. Natural language processing tools were used to facilitate the work of the dictionary compilers by providing feedback on the vocabulary they use and by automatically generating the inflectional forms and asterisks for referencing terms in the explanations. The dictionaries were printed in paper format and made available online free of charge.