The Czechoslovak Word of the Week. Re-joining Czechs and Slovaks together in an example of invisible lexicography work

Abstract

The Czecho-Slovak Word of the Week is a joint popularization project of Czech and Slovak linguists. Throughout the year, each and every week, we are publishing a new entry on the website https://slovo.juls.savba.sk, written parallelly in Czech and Slovak, the central part being a language feuilleton supplemented with data drawn from language corpora and quotations from contemporary and historical monolingual and translation dictionaries. In a way, we see the website as a dictionary, with a fixed macrostructure of 52 weekly published entries, and a microstructure, determined by the order of the individual components. Thus, our project could be considered a good example of “invisible lexicography” in practice. The target audience is presented with various kinds of lexicographic information unobtrusively, covertly, and invisibly, usually not even feeling that they are “leafing through” a dictionary. At this year’s eLex, we plan to present not only the website but also the database behind it. Our solution uses modern web technologies: the JHipster application generator in combination with the Vue front-end framework and the PostgreSQL database. The application allows the administrator to easily enter content, including importing and formatting texts from various sources, and to use audio samples from spoken corpora as well.