Abstract:

Today´s modern world is characterized by a continuous development and international cooperation in individual fields of science, research, technology and production. The mutual exchange of information, knowledge and experience, mainly among specialists and experts, is carried out by means of specialized communication. Therefore, an increasing emphasis is placed on the ability to master the specialized vocabulary of a particular subject field in both the mother tongue and the foreign language. This fact is reflected in the curriculum of subjects taught at universities, which are aimed at acquiring and practicing a subject specific vocabulary.

One of the most important teaching aids in the process of foreign language teaching and learning, mainly concerning the acquisition of specialized vocabulary, is a dictionary. The current situation often forces teachers, especially at non-philological universities, to embark on the difficult work of dictionary compilers. When elaborating a dictionary, it is natural that they encounter various pitfalls and have to overcome a number of obstacles that arise in each phase of lexicographic work, whether it is the extraction of lexical units, equivalentation, and exemplification, classification of grammatical and morphological characteristics or the design and editing of the dictionary. Nevertheless, the first phase – a conceptual phase – is sometimes at the background within the creation of the dictionary as usually more time and effort is put on the phases of extraction and equivalentation. However, a conceptual phase is the one that influences to a great extent the quality of the content and the length of the elaboration of the dictionary. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to describe the importance of the conceptual phase based on our personal experience when elaborating a multilingual specialized dictionary of hippology. We will present in more detail the difficulties we had to overcome and solve.

Keywords:

Specialized language, specialized vocabulary, dictionary, conceptual phase in the elaboration of a multilingual specialized dictionary, hippology.