Dictionary with regional colo(u)r
By Neil McIntosh

COMPILING any brand-new dictionary is a mammoth task. So when Nigel Newton, chief executive of book publisher Bloomsbury, came up with the idea of not only putting together a dictionary, but one with regional editions to make it relevant wherever it was read, it was certainly a tall order. And it was one where technology simply had to play a leading role.

In fact, with a single dictionary once taking 10 years to compile before the advent of new technology, the task might have proved impossible had the Internet not come to the rescue. In the end, the task of compiling two databases of English - one UK English, one American English - to make the new Encarta All English Dictionary, took only four years.

A team of hundreds of language experts around the world recently finished filing their contributions by e-mail to an anonymous building off London’s Soho Square, where every word was put into a custom-built database and given a mammoth string of tags defining which editions it would appear in. That it wasn’t quite a case of pushing a button to publish the various paper editions and CD-Rom to be made by Microsoft, but the boiling down of the laborious process of contributions, checking, double checking and typesetting was still a revelation.

Newton thinks the difference was so marked it may even have changed the nature of the dictionary, which will be simultaneously published in all its forms and around the world in September.

``Obviously, if the people compiling a dictionary all come from within 60 miles of one of the great universities of the world - be it Boston or somewhere in Britain - they’re going to have one outlook,’’ he says. ``On the other hand, 320 people from 20 different countries around the world are not only capable of having, but are briefed to have, a different view.

``For our competitors, it was appropriate to approach language in the way they did when they were originally commissioned which, in the case of Websters was 1828 and Oxford 1868. But now that it’s the language of one in five people in the world, it’s appropriate to find a broad cultural perspective rather than reflect the former power of the nation concerned.’’

Lexicographers in that far-flung team were also told that, if they wanted to take part in the exercise, they had to get reasonable PCs and access to the Internet, so their work could be fed straight into a database.

``The database holds the two main spelling forms of English - British and American - in parallel,’’ explains editor Kathy Rooney. ``There are many varieties of world English - Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, South African - and others around the world. We have all those in our headwords list in a highly structured database from which each edition, tailored to whichever market, can be derived.

``We will have this dictionary, which will be published worldwide simultaneously, in both print and electronic form, but what is there will be very different.

Someone in Milwaukee will think `this is my dictionary’ because colour will be spelt color and some definitions will be different, whereas someone in Macclesfield will read it and think `this is my language’ because colour will spelt with an `our’. That sounds very easy, but in reality you need to create a dictionary in parallel.

``Now, in the database we have a resource which will mean, eventually, if somebody wants a Canadian schools dictionary or a New Zealand beginners’ dictionary, we can do that very quickly.’’ (Guardian News Service)