Ordboksplanen för en svensk-finsk storordbok belyst genom några begrepp i NLO

Resumé

The planning of the large Swedish-Finnish Dictionary is influenced by three major
factors: a) The Nordic market for dictionaries is small, b) Of the two languages in
question, four variants have to be catered for: Swedish spoken in Sweden, Finno-
Swedish, Finnish spoken in Finland and Finnish spoken in Sweden. There is a separate
body maintaining and overseeing the normativity of each variant (in the two
countries), c) Within a restricted market the genuine purpose and function of a
dictionary is a multiple one: it has to be both a passive reading comprehension
dictionary and an active production dictionary, and a translation dictionary as well as
a pedagogical dictionary. All these functions determine the types of information to
be selected. The definition of what constitutes standard language changes with social
change, and a general language dictionary must include plenty of technical terms and
their equivalents.