Malmkjær - The Routledge handbook of translation studies and linguistics

The decades around the turn of the 21st century saw the rapid transition from printed to digital dictionaries. This development was triggered by the introduction of new disruptive computer and information technologies into lexicography. Today, most dictionaries are published online and can be accessed almost anywhere on earth by means of a variety of devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones. Lexicographical data are now stored in remote databases from which they can be retrieved and presented to dictionary users in real time.

The new technologies and techniques have opened completely new horizons to lexicography. While printed dictionaries provided static articles with static data to their users, the most advanced digital dictionaries now offer dynamic articles with dynamic data, i.e. articles and data that vary from consultation to consultation. This allows for a much more user-adapted and personalised lexicographical product.

Although the concepts of database and dictionary are sometimes mixed up, they are two very different things (Bergenholtz and Nielsen 2013). In fact, one lexicographical database may feed two or more dictionaries and is, as such, exclusively a tool for data storage. Dictionary users do not have direct access to the data stored in the database; they only have indirect access by means of the user interface. The interface is what the users see on the screen. Here, the data addressed to a specific lemma (headword) are structured in the most convenient way. However, not necessarily all data addressed to a given lemma in the database are presented to the user in each consultation. If appropriate information techniques e.g. data filtering and user identification are applied, it is possible to visualise only the types and amount of data considered relevant in each case (Bothma 2011).

The data stored in a lexicographical database may be available through various user interfaces which represent either one dictionary with various functions or a number of different dictionaries, each of them with their respective functions. However, even the best-designed user interfaces cannot solve all problems by themselves. Their quality also depends on the design of the underlying database, which should be structured in such a way that each piece of data which may later be displayed separately is given its own number and assigned to its own field with defined relations to other relevant data fields. This makes it possible to retrieve any specific collection of data from the database and present it on the screen in the most user-friendly way (Tarp 2015b). Hence, if both the database and the corresponding user interfaces are well designed, the resulting lexicographical tool will be able to adapt the visualised data to users specific needs when they experience problems in connection with specific activities such as writing, reading, translating, interpreting or revising texts.