This paper presents a dictionary writing system developed at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS) for an ongoing international lexicographical project that traces the way of German loanwords in the East Slavic languages Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian that were possibly borrowed via Polish. The results will be published in the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWP, lwp.ids-mannheim.de), a web portal for loanword dictionaries with German as the common donor language. The system described here is currently in use for excerpting data from a large range of historical and contemporary East Slavic monolingual dictionaries. The paper focuses on the tools that help in merging excerpts that are etymologically related to one and the same Polish etymon. The merging process involves eliminating redundancies and inconsistencies and, above all, mapping word senses of excerpted entries onto a common cross-language set of ‘metasenses’. This mapping may involve literally hundreds of excerpted East Slavic word senses, including quotations, for one ‘underlying’ Polish etymon.
The changes caused by the growing automatisation of processes in the lexicographer´s workstation and in lexicographic work, together with the ensuing needs of lexicographers and their demands for adequately targeted software, have not been discussed sufficiently in meta-lexicographic research. The aim of this paper is therefore to fill this gap, with a focus on academic non-commercial lexicography. After an introduction into the general functionalities of specific dictionary writing software, with the help of a real-life example we will discuss the lexicographic working environment, the new specific demands to lexicographic software as well as different tools. The final aim is to propose some recommendations for how to structure the lexicographic working environment to meet specific project requirements.