eDictionary: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

On its own, learning a new language is an inherently daunting task. Combined with lacking or simply non-existent language resources, the task itself seems almost impossible. For some languages, this scarcity of available resources is even more obvious and further complicates the issue. With an interdisciplinary approach, a team of linguists, language teachers, information scientists, and students themselves undertook a task of developing a learner’s dictionary of Asian languages. With a great deal of care and discussion, an online e-dictionary was chosen as a platform for its ease of use, accessibility, and expandability, in lieu of a traditional printed dictionary. Since eDictionary is built as a website, it is established as a platform, agnostic and available to everyone with Internet access. Furthermore, such a design allows a link to resources hosted on other web portals. To that end, cooperation was initiated with Croatian Language Portal and their Croatian dictionary with the aim of hyperlinking all of our Croatian lemmas to their word definitions. With the added benefits of giving users the ability to request new resources while keeping track of the request internally and allowing the updates of the whole language database seamlessly, the proposed solution to eDictionary provides user engagement and continuous integration that should benefit us all.