Euralex

Euralex Newsletter Spring 1997

The EURALEX Newsletter

Helene Malige-Klappenbach died

Helene Malige-Klappenbach hat selbst mehrfach bezeugt (so etwa im Band 100 (März 1990) der Muttersprache (S.14-17: Staatliche Bevormundung der Wörterbucharbeit in der DDR der siebziger Jahre) - aber in aller Öffentlichkeit auch schon früher, als das mit einem erheblichen Risiko verbunden war) - wie hart der Kampf gegen politische Einmischung in diese Arbeit war. Überhaupt ist mit der respektvollen Erinnerung an diese hervorragende Gelehrte untrennbar auch die Erinnerung an eine aufrechte und kompromißlos mutige Persönlichkeit verbunden: Als Kommunistin im Dritten Reich der Verfolgung ausgesetzt, am 17. Juni 1953 aber ostentativ aus der Partei ausgetreten; trotzdem wegen der Wörterbucharbeit ,,Nationalpreisträgerin'' der DDR, in den 80er Jahren dann noch als Rentnerin zum gewonnenen Prozeß gegen den Staat wegen Mißachtung der akademischen Arbeitsbedingungen angetreten. Bis in ihr hohes Alter hat Helene Malige-Klappenbach aktiv an der Debatte im Fach teilgenommen - so noch vor kurzem an einer Tagung in Japan - und dabei auch energisch die Vereinigung Deutschlands begrüßt und jede sentimentale DDR-Nostalgie nüchtern zurückgewiesen.

Björn Ekmann
Universität Kopenhagen

EURALEX Web Site

As announced in the newsletter of Winter 1996, EURALEX now has its own web site

http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex

As President of the association, I am proud of this new development, which is a contribution towards making the association more useful and more user-friendly to its members, and more familiar to people around the world who are interested in lexicography and related fields. Of course, this is the result of work that was carried out before I became President, and I would like to thank the previous EURALEX boards for making it possible. I would also like to thank the people who did the real work: Ulrich Heid and Oliver Christ of the University of Stuttgart. All those who have consulted the site will have seen that they have done a good job.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and successful year in 1997!

Henri Béjoint
President, EURALEX

EURALEX Sponsorship and Support for Lexicographical Activities

EURALEX is interested in promoting all activities connected with research in the field of lexicography, and with the practice of lexicographical activities. EURALEX can help the organizers of meetings, seminars, workshops, colloquia, or conferences on lexicography by sponsoring them. This sponsorship can take two forms:

• free publicity in the EURALEX Newsletter, published four times a year as a supplement to the International Journal of Lexicography, which has a worldwide readership;

• `seed money' to help in the organization of the event - amount and conditions to be negotiated for each individual event.

Krista Varantola
EURALEX Secretary-Treasurer
University of Tampere
Department of Translation Studies
P.O. Box 607
FIN-33101 Tampere
Finland.

Henri Béjoint
President, EURALEX

1996 Verbatim Award

• Professor Olga Karpova, English Philology Department, Ivanovo State University, Ivanovo, Russia, to be used in the organization of the Second International School in Lexicography (Ivanovo, September 1997).

• Petek Kurtböke, MA, Department of Linguistics, Monash University, Clayton, Australia, for work on a new English-Turkish/Turkish-English dictionary based on a corpus of modern Turkish.

• Dr Tamás Magay, Gáspár Károli University of the Hungarian Reformed Church Department of English, Budapest, Hungary, for the compilation of a Hungarian-English Dictionary of New Words.

• Professor D.J. Prinsloo, Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria, for work on the first dictionary of Ndebele (a Bantu language spoken in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa).

1997 Verbatim Award

September 30 1997	receipt of applications
December 1997	notification of results
January 1998	presentation of Award(s)

1. a letter specifying the amount applied for;

2. a statement giving full details of the purpose to which the funds would be put, and an indication of expected tangible results (e.g. publications);

3. a curriculum vitae including qualifications, details of previous lexicographical or related work, and publications;

4. one professional or academic reference;

5. details of funding received or applied for in relation to the project for which the Verbatim Award is being sought.

1997 Verbatim Award
EURALEX Assistant Secretary-Treasurer Ulrich Heid
Universität Stuttgart
IMS/CL
Azenbergstrasse 12
D-70174 Stuttgart
Germany
E-mail: Ulrich.Heid@ims.uni-stuttgart.de

The Selection Panel consists of the EURALEX President, Professor H. Béjoint, and the two immediate past presidents, Professor F.E. Knowles and Ms B.T.S. Atkins.

The Award is open to EURALEX members only, but applications will be accepted from people who have applied for EURALEX membership and are awaiting confirmation of this. If you want to join EURALEX, please write to:

Ms. Heather Vigar
EURALEX Membership Secretary
OUP Journals
Oxford University Press
Walton Street
Oxford OX2 6DP
UK
Fax number: +44 1 865 267 773. Email: vigarh@oup.co.uk

The Crediting of the Work of Lexicographers

The full text of this newsletter is published on the DSNA web site

http://www.csuohio.edu/dsna/vol20n1.html

The EURALEX board invites comments on these proposals, as we are considering the possibility of endorsing them or recommending the adoption of similar guidelines. Please send your comments to

The EURALEX President
Professor Henri Béjoint
Département LEA
Université Lumière - Lyon 2
86 rue Pasteur, F
69365 Lyon Cedex 07
France

Abridged version of DSNA proposed guidelines

I. Introduction

Almost all dictionaries are owned by their publishers, either because they are entirely staff-produced or because they are produced in part by independent contractors who sign "work-for-hire" agreements. We have no quarrel with this arrangement. Since the publisher must provide a very large investment and takes all the risk, it is reasonable for the publisher to demand that the work be wholly owned and that subsequent adaptations, abridgments, etc., belong to the publisher. Indeed, few dictionaries would be undertaken on any other basis. The publisher's right to credit whomever it wants is not in dispute.

Since dictionaries are publisher-owned, lexicographers have no equity in the work they may have spent eight or ten years working on, and must rely solely on credit being given for their dossiers. Their knowledge and experience have no tangible products except the dictionaries they have contributed to; the rest is in the lexicographer's brain. If lexicographers are deprived of credit, they have no basis for establishing their credentials in the future to obtain another job. They have no basis for making a career of lexicography. In fact, this is precisely the condition we are in today.

II. The Problem

Because dictionaries take so long to complete, the composition of the editorial staff at the initiation of a project is often very different from that at its conclusion. Also, since dictionaries are expensive undertakings, they often generate a progeny of derivative works, whose relationship with their parent varies but is inevitably diluted over time. Further, every dictionary, if successful, remains in print for a long time and undergoes numerous revisions, some small and some great.

It is obviously impossible to expect that everyone who has worked on a dictionary, even for a short time and in a minor capacity, will be accorded credit in perpetuity. We are not here concerned with some theoretical ethic but with the practical matter of assuring that proper credit is given to professional lexicographers pursuing careers in their chosen work. Although we all recognize that the contributions of clerical and other supporting staff can be crucially important and deserve recognition in simple human terms, such matters are not the concern of this paper. Our concern is with lexicographers.

III. The Proposal

Two separate but related issues are credit itself (that is, listing lexicographers' names on the staff page) and the form of the credit (the title under which lexicographers are listed). Our main concern is with credit itself, although at the very top level, the form of the credit is of concern as well. Below we consider the role of the top editor first, then the roles of the staff.

We suggest that the chief editor of a dictionary be called the "editor-in-chief" and that, if the editor-in-chief appointed at the beginning of a project retains that position at its conclusion, he or she should be accorded credit in the printed (or electronic) book as "editor-in-chief." This is the customary title for the chief editor, although there may be reasons in some cases for not employing it (as because of numerous changes among the top editors).

Complications arise when the editor-in-chief resigns, is dismissed, or dies before the end of the project. Obviously, we cannot account for every possibility, and we cannot argue that an incompetent or otherwise unsatisfactory editor-in-chief be credited simply because he or she was originally hired for the job. But if a person has held a position as editor-in-chief one half the duration of a project, or for five years (whichever is less), he or she deserves to be recognized as the original editor of the project. Anyone who has been engaged at the highest level with a project for that long must have had a major impact on it and deserves to have his or her contribution noted.

The same rule of thumb would apply to any other managing editors and senior staff, regardless of their specific titles such as "supervising editor," "executive editor," "senior editor," or "editor."

If the project has run its course pretty much as originally planned, the original editor should be identified by his or her original title with the dates of activity specified. However, in those cases where the project has undergone a major restructuring following the departure of the first editor-in-chief, he or she might be more properly identified in some other way, such as "contributing editor" or "consulting editor." The principle here is the extent to which the first editor's original vision or plan of the work was carried through. If it was, he or she deserves to be recognized as the chief editor. However, if it was substantially reshaped by another, it is only fair to recognize that the succeeding editor was the creator of the plan for the completed dictionary, while not ignoring the contribution of the first editor.

Although we have proposed limits of five years or one half the duration of the project, publishers should be urged to recognize contributions of lesser duration perhaps two years or more in similar fashion. But we should regard the five-year criterion as essential, and any deviation from it a serious departure from the standards of professional reference publishing.

An abridged dictionary may have a different editor-in-chief and staff than those of the parent work. Clearly, they should be recognized by the guidelines stated above for the work in which they were engaged. In every case, however, the editor-in-chief (or editors-in-chief) of the parent work should be acknowledged, either on the staff page or in the introduction of the abridgment.

If an abridgment is almost entirely a straightforward reduction and not a substantial revision of the content, it would be appropriate also to list the entire senior staff of the parent dictionary. If, on the other hand, the derived work involves major changes in the content, only the editor-in-chief(s) of the parent work need be given, since the staff of the derivative work in this case deserves more recognition than the staff of the original work.

How long after the initial publication of a dictionary should the editor-in-chief and staff be listed? In our view, the origination of a new dictionary is such a rare and difficult enterprise that the original editor-in-chief and senior staff should be listed on all succeeding editions, even if the placement of their names on the staff page descends gradually, like a helium balloon with a slow leak, until it nestles at the bottom of the page in small type. It should nonetheless remain.

However, if the dictionary undergoes a major revision (as, for example, Webster's Third New International compared with the Second Edition), we are justified in regarding the new edition as a new dictionary, and accord its staff the same rights here adumbrated for any new dictionary. In that case, the staff of the earlier edition need not be immortalized, although, as is usually the case, the introduction would cite the chief editor of the earlier edition. This is not our concern, however, and is not part of our guidelines.

So far we have considered the editor-in-chief and senior staff, but credit should also be given to the junior staff, younger lexicographers just getting their careers underway, sometimes designated "associate editors" (though in some cases that title applies to relatively senior staff) or "assistant editors." We propose the following rules for staff generally, including junior staff.

Anyone working in any lexicographic capacity on a project for two years or more deserves to be given credit on the completion of the original edition of the work, with a job title that is commensurate with his or her level of responsibility and the nature of his or her assignment. However, it is unreasonable to expect that such credit be recorded on every subsequent edition, revision, or abridgment based on the work in which each editor was engaged. Such notice becomes impractical as new contributions from new editors must be acknowledged. Few companies can maintain accurate records of junior editors long after they have departed, and it is impractical to expect that every editor be listed on every subsequent edition.

If a young editor makes a career of lexicography, he or she should graduate to a more senior position and be accorded the more permanent credit advocated in this paper. In the meantime, even the single listing in the original edition to which he or she contributed will provide potentially valuable evidence of his or her work.

The foregoing considerations have led to the following proposed set of guidelines, now being considered for adoption by the Executive Board.

Guidelines for crediting the work of lexicographers