Report on EURALEX LUA 1998: Prof. M. J. Mafela, Pretoria, South Africa:
Towards a bilingual dictionary for Venda
The 1998 Laurence Urdang Award supported the continuation of the lexicographical project of collecting data for a bilingual dictionary in Venda which Prof. M. J. Mafela had initiated at the end of 1998. According to Prof. Mafela, he could have accomplished very little of it, had it not been for the Award.
The project on a bilingual dictionary in Venda is necessary in South Africa because Venda is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. For the translation to all speakers of all those languages to be successful, bilingual dictionaries are indispensable.
At first the research was conducted with regard to the existing bilingual dictionaries in Venda to see if there are any deficiencies. Prof. Mafela found that they were characterized by only few entries. This is a result of the neglect of the development of a corpus in Venda. Very little had been included with regard to scientific and technical terms and also to dialectal terms.
Prof. Mafela collected several thousand entries and stored them; by the Award he was put in a position to involve colleagues and students in collecting further data, written and spoken, and he visited people in rural areas to verify the equivalents of some of the terms collected. Also dialectal and culture-specific terms have been included in the newly developped corpus.
The Award also enabled Prof. Mafela to attend several workshops organized by lexicography and terminology specialists.

Prof. M. J. Mafela
Department of African languages
P.O. Box 392
Pretoria
0003
South Africa

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