Bilingual Lexicography and Corpus Methods. The Example of German-Basque as Language Pair

Lexicography over the last decades has incorporated Corpus Linguistics methods. Lexicographers who start to work on an electronic dictionary, starting from scratch as Computational Linguists, and with little or no previous work done on their language pair, have to evaluate the contributions Corpus Linguistics methods may provide to their project, not only for lemmalist building, bilingual dictionary drafts and their documentation process in static entry editing, but also for dictionary publishing that contains dynamically generated corpus data displays. In the context of a low- or medium-density language pair, they will have to ask which electronic resources and tools are needed and available, and to evaluate the bilingual glossaries obtained with computational methods for their adequacy as bilingual dictionary draft. In this paper, we present some research on German- Basque corpus-based lexicography and describe our proposals for a new German-Basque electronic dictionary for Basque-L1 German learners. The observations and decisions to take at each stage of the lexicographical process may serve as reference for future dictionary projects that start from scratch, especially projects on other low- or medium-density language pairs.