History, current status and new trends in the compilationof Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian dictionaries

The history of compiling of dictionaries is defined in the Czech background with several principalcultural and political-social periods. The birth of the Czech lexicography is associated with"glosses" written in the foreign language text (gloss is a short annotation explaining an unknown wordin text). The first bilingual dictionaries appeared in the 1360s for students of the Charles University inPrague. These dictionaries already contain a theoretical description in the entry. First specialized dictionariesappeared, such as etymological ones.Josef Jungman, the main representative of the National Revival, in 1835 issued a five-volumeCzech-German Dictionary, which is so far the basic piece of work of the Czech lexicography. It is abilingual dictionary with the interpretation of Czech words and their contextual use, phraseology andsynonyms.In the 20th century a large number of scientific works appeared, which served as the theoreticalbase for practice of compiling of dictionaries. In the 1950s many dictionaries for specific areas ofeconomy were published: The Russian-Czech Textile Dictionary by Jankovsky and Semenikhin, TheRussian-Czech and Czech-Russian Electronic Dictionary by Havelka, Russian-Czech Machine BuildingDictionary by Deidar and Shevchik.Among the well-known representatives of the Russian-Czech lexicography of the last century wecan find a Czechoslovak specialist in Russian philology of Russian origin L. Kopecky. In 1937 hepublished The Russian-Czech School Dictionary and The Russian-Czech Dictionary, which was rewritteninto a six-volume Great Russian-Czech Dictionary. On the basis of Kopecky's dictionaries anew large Czech-Russian Dictionary by Sadlikova appeared. In 2002 an electronic version was issued.The dictionary has over 120,000 Czech phrases and more than 200,000 Russian equivalents. Thedictionary also includes colloquial and slang expressions, scientific, economic and technical terminologyand other terminology of the rapidly changing areas.Socio-political and cultural changes that occurred in the Czech Republic influenced the vocabularyof the Czech language with a large extent. In the late 1990s The Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian Dictionary of Neologisms appeared, which was reissued in an updated form in 2004. Amongsome new special dictionaries there are, for example, Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian dictionarieswith the economic, political and legal vocabulary written by Czirikova, a technical dictionary byWagner, a management dictionary Vavrechka and Lednicki, The Czech-Russian Phraseological Dictionaryby Mokienko and Wurm and The Russian-Czech Phraseological Dictionary by Stepanova.On May 13, 2010 under the protection of the linguistic society of the Academy of Sciences aseminar named "Dictionaries of Modern Slavic Languages. Plans and Results of the Czech MultilingualLexicography" took place in Prague. Such events suggest the ever-evolving trends to understandingand description of the vocabulary, its classification, comparison and translation into Russian andother foreign languages.

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