Abstract
Abstract: The article discusses the challenges that confronted the team of compilers working on the monolingual Shona Children's Dictionary (henceforth SCD). It looks at the active involvement of the target users in shaping the project and discusses the considerations for the implementation of their recommenda-tions. Matters of concern include issues of headword selection, especially problems of dialect representation in the dictionary. The article also discusses the inclusion of grammatical information such as tone marking. The SCD is one of the many efforts to promote and raise the functions of the indigenous languages in Zim-babwe. Of special interest in this article is therefore the discussion on the inclusion of international words like those denoting weight, distance and mathematical and scientific concepts. The article also considers the treatment of taboo words in the SCD, which takes into account that society has to open up culturally to be able to unequivocally view some of the aspects of life with which present-day children are confronted. The article lastly discusses how a balance was reached for accommodating the target users' proposal for the inclusion of an elaborate back matter in view of the limited available scope and space of the SCD.
Highlights
A team of three people at the University of Zimbabwe's African Languages Research Institute (ALRI) embarked on a pioneering project to compile a monolingual Shona Children's Dictionary ( SCD) whose main target users are school children at primary level. This team worked closely with teachers and parents who automatically became an interested party in the dictionary project, constituting the majority of the target users
In societies with a long history of lexicography, it is easy to identify the gaps that a newly initiated dictionary project is meant to fill within the context of other earlier and previously published dictionary products
Despite the varying needs of the target users and the difference in the challenges faced by compilers working on different dictionary projects, the target users' needs have to remain a priority
Summary
A team of three people at the University of Zimbabwe's African Languages Research Institute (ALRI) embarked on a pioneering project to compile a monolingual Shona Children's Dictionary ( SCD) whose main target users are school children at primary level. In societies with a long history of lexicography, it is easy to identify the gaps that a newly initiated dictionary project is meant to fill within the context of other earlier and previously published dictionary products. In such situations, both the compiler and the target users have a common goal and expectation. 122 Esau Mangoya with are mainly dialectal representation, tone marking for the purpose of pronunciation, inclusion of international words, the treatment of words deemed culturally taboo and the setting of the back matter
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