Resumen de Language Policy in Slovenia: Language Users' needs with a Special Focus on Lexicography and Translation Tools
In the following contribution we present the design and the sociolinguistic background of the government-funded Slovenian Language Policy and User Needs CRP 2016 project conducted between October 2016 and September 2017 under the leadership of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Broadly speaking, the survey, which constitutes the core of the project, focuses on the language needs of four main categories:
speakers of Slovene as their mother tongue; Slovenian minorities living across the border in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, with their specific linguistic and cultural background (bilingualism); users/learners of foreign languages; and users with special needs. All of these are investigated from the perspective of the legal framework regulating language use in individual fields, communicative practices, empirical evaluation of users’ habits and attitudes; and, of particular importance for the present contribution, the current state-of-the-art in language infrastructure, including language technologies and digitisation. “Language description and language infrastructure in Slovenia” is a topic covered by the ZRC SAZU CRP 2016 project that will be treated in this paper in more detail, with special attention given to the questions asked about the use of the existing monolingual and bilingual (multilingual) language resources, in particular, dictionaries and other lexical resources. An in-depth survey will cover different groups of language professionals who use Slovene/foreign languages on a regular basis in the production of written and spoken texts for public use, such as journalists, publicists, fiction writers, bloggers, researchers, copywriters, PR professionals, legal document compilers, business and public administrators, as well as proofreaders and language editors and, last but not least, translators and interpreters.
