The project of creating an Internet-based comparative glossary related to the state institutions of Croatia, Austria and Germany is being conducted at the Department of German Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. The Croatian name of the project is Poredbeni pojmovnik (POPOJ): hrvatske, austrijske i njemačke državne institucije – hrvatsko-njemački i njemačko-hrvatski internetski leksikon (hereinafter POPOJ). Participating in the project are a total of 15 graduate students majoring in translation. POPOJ is expected to contain lexicographical units in areas including: parliament, government, presidency, judicial system, electoral system, political parties, local government and self-government, constitution, unions and non-governmental organizations.

POPOJ is intended to be an Internet-based lexicon that will contain and contrast pieces of information that are terminologically and culturally relevant for understanding the state institutions of the three focus countries – Croatia, Austria and Germany. The lexicographical entry for a given lexicographical unit shall – in addition to grammatical data, e.g. gender and inflectional morphemes – contain a lexicographical gloss, i.e. the definition of a given lexicographical unit. By having terminological data displayed in such a bilingual way, the person using the lexicon will be able to have an insight into the cultural and historical similarities and differences within the scope of available data. We believe that such a contrastive way of displaying linguistically and culturally relevant data provides the person using the lexicon with the possibility of processing the material in a way that is usually not available when using traditional bilingual dictionaries, with such pieces of information often being of crucial value in the process of translation.

Since we were able to identify this as something that the existing bilingual dictionaries lack, we have decided to get to work by ourselves and apply the concept in the creation of an bilingual lexicon for other people to use. Furthermore, we were able to find out that the existing bilingual dictionaries occasionally fail to take into account the differences between the terms that are used in Germany and those that are used in Austria. Inspired by this finding, we have decided to create a collection of linguistic, terminological and cultural data for all three countries, all in one place. Considering the ongoing trends in lexicography and predominantly guided by the needs of a modern user, we believe that making a publication like this one available on the Internet is a matter of the utmost importance and the only way of providing a solution to fulfil such needs.

The project will have the following three main stages: Stage 1 includes the decision-making in relation to technical design, as well as the answering of all the questions related to the processing of lexicographical data. Stage 2 includes the commencement of the processing of lexicographical data in the strict sense. For this purpose, the project participants are divided into working groups. Each working group consists of three members, with each member given the task of processing the source material for one of the three focus countries – Croatia, Austria and Germany. The choice of the texts to be used as the source in the extraction of linguistic and lexicographical data is in the discretion of the project participants, i.e. each working group. Upon the completion of the linguistic and lexicographical processing of the selected material in accordance with the principles defined during Stage 1, the data will be organized and merged using Excel spreadsheets. The final stage of the project consists of computer processing and publishing on the website of the Department of German Studies.

Project participants in the 2019 summer semester are: Luka Borovac Gazibarić, Nadin Horvat, Miroslav Hradel, Blaž Ivanković, Hrvoje Krajnović, Lara Kuš, Dora Lam Dolički, Petra Koljnrekaj, Robert Matečić, Julia Mitterbauer, Helena Nikolić, Petra Špoljar, Nikola Trstenjak, Karla Žban, Dominik Zlodi.

Project leader: Petra Koljnrekaj