(Re-)Digitizing 吳守禮 Ngôo Siú-lé’s M andarin – T aiwanese Dictionary (2022)

Abstract: This paper presents the efforts conducted to obtain a usable and open digital version in XML-TEI of one of the major lexicographic work for bilingual Taiwanese dictionaries, namely the 《國臺對照活用辭典》(Practical Mandarin-Taiwanese Dictionary) The original dictionary was published in 2000, after decades of work by Prof. 吳守禮 (Ngôo Siu-le/Wu Shouli)

## introduction this paper describes the efforts, the issues and some proposed solutions to conduct the redigitization of the two volumes (over 2800 pages) of the 《 國 臺 對 照 活 用 辭 典 》 practical mandarin-taiwanese dictionary, a masterpiece of taiwanese lexicography authored by prof. 吳守 禮 (ngôo siu-le/wu shouli) in the last decades of the 20th century and published in 2000. the author started its work before the unicode was founded, at a time when commercial sinographic word processing softwares were designed mostly for mandarin. he had to come up with workaround solutions to print sinograms and phonetic symbols specific to taiwanese, involving the creation of thousands of glyphs. as a result, our work was not strictly speaking a digitizing project, since the original document was already digital-born. but we had to face a number of challenges to turn the original files from their obscure proprietary format into a more modern, open and standard format (we choose xml-tei) in order to make it easily usable in future projects. ## structure of the dictionary this massive piece of work covers over 12, 000 sinograms and 40, 000 lexical entries, providing information including traditional phonology, syntax, meaning (bilingual) and semantic relations. in this section we describe how the dictionary was organized. ## tei output to distribute the dataset in a format as standard as possible, we do our best to follow the tei guidelines with specific sections for dictionaries. we use entryfree elements to describe sinograms and entry elements for words. special characters mapped from the original pua are described inside the tei-header element as many chardecl. for the moment, we count 6, 900 chardecl, 11, 805 entryfree and 43, 926 entry elements. these figures do not include data from the ocr which is still a work in progress. the exact xml schema is also subject to evolution as we plan to deeper analyze the content of the entries, so we invite the readers to refer to the current version released on the zenodo repository. ## conclusion and future work we hope to achieve a high degree of felicity to the original work by prof. 吳 ngôo. we will then be able to provide easier and broader access to this valuable material, with full-text search and reverse index. our experiment with escriptorium also encourages us to address other volumes, such as the handwritten taiwanese dictionary published in 1986 by the same author( 吳 , 1986).