Abstract
Vocabulary is an essential component of study, of reading and writing skills. At present, English is the primary language of tertiary education in South Africa, and this puts students from other language backgrounds at a disadvantage. The proposed dictionary will therefore be aimed at second language English users who are entry level students at university. It will be in four languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Sepedi. I.S.P. Nation and J. Coady have compiled an academic core vocabulary which tertiary students in all subject fields need to master in order to be able to encode and decode tertiary level texts, and this has been the basis for the planned dictionary. However, this list needs to be compared to and updated with material from a South African academic corpus. A preliminary comparative study has been conducted on the basis of authentic South African data, and a revised list has been created. The dictionary will not be subject-specific, but will deal with a general subtechnical vocabulary. Full definitions will be provided in all four languages, as well as translation equivalents, with English as the pivot language. Where a lexical gap occurs, translation equivalents will be coined with the help of the relevant experts. Thus the dictionary will also participate in much-needed corpus development of the African languages. It should become a valuable reference tool for both teacher and student.
Highlights
In 1997 Peter Titlestad, Head of the Department of English, University of Pretoria, initiated a dictionary project with the aim of producing an explanatory multilingual dictionary of academic words. This dictionary is being produced in collaboration with Adelia Carstens (Department of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria) and Danie Prinsloo (Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria), with two research assistants, the authors of this article
The dictionary will be non-subject-specific, dealing rather with an academic core vocabulary, and could be classified as a hybrid type, which is intended to function as a teaching and tutoring aid for university students at entry level
Even first language English students tend to find the jump from the vocabulary required to both read and produce texts at school level to that required at university level, a problem
Summary
Comparing Our list and the Nation list confirmed the existence of words with specific variant meanings in South African English academic usage. Such examples of South African senses will be marked They are the exception rather than the rule, and we shall generally aim to maintain a certain standard of academic English, which Peter Titlestad believes exists as an important recognisable international form of English. In a bilingual dictionary there are set ways of dealing with this problem, but in a quadrilingual dictionary the situation is more complicated and challenging, and will require creative and innovative solutions Another serious hurdle to be confronted when compiling a South African multilingual dictionary is the occasional absence of word-for-word translation equivalents across languages. When more work has been done in this regard, the dictionary will have to be revised
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