Experts ans Specialised Lexicography: perspectives and needs

Résumé

This study was performed with two main purposes in mind. The first was to understand and predict the lexicographical needs of experts in communicative situations, while the second was to evaluate specialised dictionaries from experts’ point of view, considering their knowledge proficiency and the lack of dictionaries aimed primarily at experts. This paper consists of two main parts. The first presents the theoretical background on experts´ needs based on the functional theory of lexicography (Bergenholtz, Tarp, Nielsen and Kauffman) as well as the communicative theory of terminology (Cabré), while the second looks at experts’ expectations about specialised dictionaries based on empirical research. We conducted evaluation experiments where experts were asked to complete a questionnaire either for selecting the most needed information related to their professional tasks or for rating existing specialised dictionaries.