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Making an XML-based Japanese-Slovene Learners’ Dictionary

In this paper we present a hypertext dictionary of Japanese lexical units for Slovene students of Japanese at the Faculty of Arts of Ljubljana University. The dictionary is planned as a long-term project in which a simple dictionary is to be gradually enlarged and enhanced, taking into account the needs of the students. Initially, the dictionary was encoded in a tabular format, in a mixture of encodings, and subsequently rendered in HTML. The paper first discusses the conversion of the dictionary into XML, into an encoding that complies with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. The conversion into such an encoding validates, enriches, explicates and standardises the structure of the dictionary, thus making it more usable for further development and linguistically oriented research. We also present the current Web implementation of the dictionary, which offers full text search and a tool for practising inflected parts of speech. The paper gives an overview of related research, i.e. other XML oriented Web dictionaries of Slovene and East Asian languages and presents planned developments, i.e. the inclusion of the dictionary into the Reading Tutor program.