Le dictionnaire de chimie en lingála pour les élèves de Kinshasa

Abstract

Dictionary of Chemistry in Lingála for Kinshasa Students.In well-documented languages, the lexicographer aiming to make a specialized dictionary will pro­cess an available corpus to extract data (candidate terms, definitions and exam­ples). This approach is not suitable for poorly documented languages, for which texts in any given specialized domain may be few and far between. This is the case with Lingála, spoken in the city of Kinshasa, in the field of chemistry. Besides processing the available corpora, the lexicographer needs to coin terms for con­cepts and to create definitions and examples in order to produce dic­tion­aries meeting users' expec­ta­tions. For this purpose, one of the two following meth­odologies can be adopted.The first, and more commonly employed methodology adopts the translation approach. A cor­pus which is available in the source language is processed to extract lemmas, definitions and exam­ples and eventually classify data in the source language. The document obtained in this way is then translated into the tar­get language.According to the second methodology, in the absence of well-documented specialized cor­pora in the target language, concepts are defined and coined directly in the target language. Exam­ples are also produced directly in the target language. This approach calls for the lexicographer to be an expert in the given field or for him/her to work with an expert who can produce spe­cialized knowledge in the target language. Then the lexicographer will submit his/her findings to other native speakers, who are also experts in that given field for validation. This is the methodology we have adopted and we are to describe in this paper.In fact, this article describes the approach we have followed in order to make a Lingála–French bilingual dictionary of chemistry for students and teachers of the third year of secondary school in Kinshasa.