K otázkám etnologické terminologie a metodiky tvorby dvojjazyčného etnologického slovníku

The development of different scientific fields has brought about the formation of specialized vocabularies or terminologies whose aim is to standardise the designations of things, activities and processes in the individual branches. Today, many researchers study literature in foreign languages or publish their work abroad; almost every academic journal contains summaries in English. Ethnology is a very specific field, as it covers all areas of human life and its terminology is highly culture dependent. When translating ethnological texts into English, we encounter many problems. The expressions for elements of traditional material, spiritual and social culture in different countries vary in the same way as their cultural and social background does. No specialized Czech-English dictionary of ethnology has been published so far. The National Institute of Folk Culture is planning to publish such handbook in the form of an online database which will include a wide range of linguistic, semantic and encyclopaedic data. An examination of the identified needs and available resources followed with a presentation of the working methods as well as the methodology formulation including the dictionary structure, selection of headwords and analysis of problematic issues in translation, are summarised in this study and should lay the groundwork of the dictionary project.