Open Access

Gertrud Faaß, Sonja Bosch

• This paper describes a first version of an integrated e-dictionary translating possessive constructions from English to Zulu. Zulu possessive constructions are difficult to learn for non-mother tongue speakers. When translating from English into Zulu, a speaker needs to be acquainted with the nominal classification of nouns indicating possession and possessor. Furthermore, (s)he needs to be informed about the morpho-syntactic rules associated with certain combinations of noun classes. Lastly, knowledge of morpho-phonetic changes is also required, because these influence the orthography of the output word forms. Our approach is a novel one in that we combine e-lexicography and natural language processing by developing a (web) interface supporting learners, as well as other users of the dictionary to produce Zulu possessive constructions. The final dictionary that we intend to develop will contain several thousand nouns which users can combine as they wish. It will also translate single words and frequently used multiword expressions, and allow users to test their own translations. On request, information about the morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonetic rules applied by the system are displayed together with the translation. Our approach follows the function theory: the dictionary supports users in text production, at the same time fulfilling a cognitive function.