DIDIC:
The definitive Dutch-Indonesian dictionary
The Dutch-Indonesian Dictionary Project (DIDIC) is in the process of compiling a long-awaited dictionary that is productive and receptive at the same time. It is geared to the needs of Dutch users for whom Indonesian is a foreign language, and one for Indonesian users for whom the Dutch entries and their uses need extra clarification.
* By HEIN STEINHAUER
In recent literature on linguistic imperialism, Indonesian has been accused of betraying its Austronesian roots by adapting its lexicon to the 'common European' conceptualization of the world. Indeed, Indonesian has changed since the 1940s, but this is largely because of the addition of new domains of language use, such as journalism and scientific discourse, rather than a matter of surrender to a lexical and conceptual 'common European' takeover. It is our definite impression, based on daily experience, that proper Indonesian equivalents appear to be absent for many Dutch items (and vice versa).
More than seventy years ago, Indonesian nationalists proclaimed Malay, henceforth to be called bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian, as the sole national language of the future independent state of Indonesia. Until the Japanese occupation, however, Dutch and what the Dutch government and scientists alike continued to refer to as Malay retained their diverse functions in colonial society. When Dutch was finally ousted by the Japanese, Malay/Indonesian was free to commence its dazzling rise into what it has become today: a 'modern' language, lexicologically geared to the needs of a global urban culture, without having lost its local historical roots.
With the introduction of mass education after independence, in which Indonesian has always been the major if not the only language of instruction and interaction, the number of speakers rose dramatically. Ten years ago, some seventeen per cent of the population of five years and older claimed to use Indonesian as its first language. For over sixty per cent, Indonesian functioned as a second language. Indeed, there was a clear correlation between age and the ability to speak Indonesian: the percentage of speakers of Indonesian among younger generations was conspicuously higher. Even if account is taken of the fact that the current economic crisis has had negative effects on school attendance and that regional autonomy and disturbances in post-New Order Indonesia may slow down the process, it seems fair to predict that Indonesian will in the future oust many, if not most, of the nearly five hundred regional languages which still exist today. Whatever the future of Indonesia will be, Indonesian will remain a major world language and an essential means of access to the Southeast Asian area.
Until recently written sources on that area, especially on Indonesia, have been predominantly in Dutch. For many fields of knowledge about Indonesia, a knowledge of Dutch is still a prerequisite. Up-to-date dictionaries are therefore a must for both the Indonesian and the Dutch markets.
However, as a result of the prolonged decolonization process in both Indonesia and the Netherlands, the need for such dictionaries was not perceived as particularly vital during the initial decades after the Indonesian declaration of Independence, but since the early 1970s relations and contacts between both countries have normalized and intensified.
Consequently, several Dutch-Indonesian/Indonesian-Dutch dictionaries were published in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them were a curious mixture of non-existing or obsolete Dutch, not always standard Indonesian, insufficient grammatical information and examples, and circumscriptions where lexical equivalents would have been possible. Only since 1990 has an adequate receptive Indonesian-Dutch dictionary been available: Teeuw, A., Indonesisch-Nederlands Woordenboek, fourth, revised and enlarged edition, Leiden: KITLV Publishers (1996). Its Dutch-Indonesian pendant took even more time to be implemented.
When Susi Moeimam of the Dutch language department of Universitas Indonesia (Depok, Jakarta) defended her PhD thesis on bilingual lexicography at Leiden University in October 1994, fundraising for such a dictionary gained momentum. After three years of lobbying, the Dutch-Indonesian Dictionary project (DIDIC) could finally be launched in November 1997. The main sponsor is the Dutch-Flemish Commissie voor Lexicologische Vertaalvoorzieningen (CLVV, Committee for Lexicographical Interlingual Resources); additional funds have been provided by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Leiden University, and the International Institute for Asian Studies.
The project is building on a digitalized database of some 50,000 modern Dutch entries with grammatical information, collocations, example sentences, and idioms, which has been developed by the CLVV. As far as possible, appropriate translation equivalents in modern standard Indonesian are sought for these Dutch entries and constructions, with the final aim of enabling the output of both a productive and a receptive dictionary: i.e. a dictionary geared to the needs of Dutch users for whom Indonesian is a foreign language, and one for Indonesian users for whom the Dutch entries and their uses need extra clarification. Therefore, additional information has to be added for Indonesian users, especially on the irregular flection patterns of Dutch entries, and for Dutch users to disambiguate terms in which there appear to be more than one Indonesian equivalent for a Dutch item (see the example for rijst 'rice' in the box).
The additional information also includes a specification of the exact relationship between the Indonesian 'equivalent' and the Dutch original. Thanks to the lexicological programme Omkering van Biliguale Bestanden (OMBI, Inverting Bilingual Databases, again developed by the CLVV) and with the aid of this extra information, it will be possible to use the Dutch-Indonesian database through a turnkey operation as the basis for an Indonesian-Dutch counterpart. It is foreseen that a future, new edition of Teeuw's Indonesian-Dutch dictionary will also make use of the inverted DIDIC database.
In the initial stages of the project, the OMBI programme was still partly experimental. This was the main reason the original final date of the project had to be postponed from 1 August 2000 to 1 May 2001. The DIDIC's lexicological approach has now attracted international attention: from 27 30 June of last year, the Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu (Institute of the Malay World and Civilization) of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, in conjunction with the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia), organized two lexicographical workshops around the project, in which the DIDIC team members were keynote speakers.
A recurring observation during the seminars was that the production of both a productive and receptive dictionary as envisaged by DIDIC can only be achieved through close co-operation between native speakers of both languages concerned. *
The members of the Dutch-Indonesian Dictionary Project are (fltr): Susi Moeimam, Ewald Ebing, and Hein Steinhauer.
*
INDONESIAN VERSION:
rijst [de, jamak: -- ] padi, beras, nasi;...
DUTCH VERSION:
rijst [de, plural: -- ] (plant, korrels in halm) padi, (ongekookt) beras, (gekookt) nasi;...
Dr Lisbeth Littrup has worked as a lecturer at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen and written a number of articles on Malaysian literature. She visited the IIAS in February 2000.
E-mail: stenlis@worldonline.dk