Four centuries of Dutch-Japanese relations still have not led to the creation of a usable modern Japanese-Dutch dictionary, in spite of the fact that such a dictionary would be of great value for everyone who is interested in Japan, such as students of the Japanese language, travelers or people doing research in Japan. Moreover, this dictionary would be of great importance to the business world, the tourist industry and to various government institutions in the Netherlands and Belgium as well as in Japan.

In the past a few Japanese-Dutch dictionaries have been compiled, but none of these is still of use today. The last serious attempt was made by P.A. van der Stadt, whose concise dictionary “Nichi-Ran Jiten” was published in 1934. Since then some other attempts have been made, but these have never resulted in a fully-fledged Japanese-Dutch dictionary, and proved to be no more than wordlists.

The aim of the project which I set up together with my friends and colleagues Hetty Geerdink and Nobuko Karthaus, is to fill this gap and, with an enthusiastic team of scholars, translators, advanced students, web developers and database specialists from The Netherlands, Belgium and Japan, to create a fully fledged modern Japanese-Dutch dictionary consisting of at least 90.000 words, which will appear in printed form as well as an electronic version.

The electronic edition of the dictionary will be linked to audiovisual data and will be equipped with cultural background information to clarify the words. Furthermore, the project team will investigate the possibilities of launching the electronic version of the dictionary on DVD, as software for handheld devices called word tanks or as an online service that users may subscribe to.

The project’s main target will be to compile a dictionary that can be used for years to come and to set up a system in which the dictionary can be supplemented and revised continuously.

Such a project needs a homepage which I started building together with Hetty Geerdink. Once more I took Joomla as the content management system for the site and again the Hivemind template from Rockettheme, because it is so straight forward and easy to adjust.

To manage all the lemmata I built a Lemmata Management System called Dictionist of which you can find the description here.