From the History of Creating The Contemporary Bulgarian-Polish Dictionary in Poland

The rapid development of the Bulgarian and Polish lexis after 2000 and the lack of up-to-date Bulgarian-Polish dictionaries at that time inspired Joanna Satoła-Staśkowiak and Violetta Koseska-Toszewa to embark on the compilation of a Bulgari-an-Polish dictionary that would reflect the trends and phenomena observed in the con-temporary language. In preparing the lexical material, the two researchers used electronic language corpora developed by teams of which they were a part. Drawing on their previous experience in comparative (including semantic) studies of Bulgarian and Polish, the authors focused on creating an entirely new dictionary based on an original methodology of lexicographic description. In the process of compiling the dictionary entries, various issues related to the differentiation of lexical units and their grammatical and semantic characteristics had to be solved. The first volume of the Contemporary Bulgarian-Polish Dictionary was published at the end of 2014. This is the second major Bulgarian-Polish dictionary to be printed in Poland. It comes 51 years after the publication of the first bilingual Bulgarian-Polish dictionary by Franciszek Sławski in 1963. The last edition of Sławski’s dictionary (co-authored by Sabina Radewa) titled A Supplemented Handy Bulgarian-Polish Dictionary was published in 1987, and much of the material in it is now outdated. The Contemporary Bulgarian-Polish Dictionary by J. Satoła-Staśkowiak and V. Koseska-Toszewa is intended for lecturers, Slavicists and students of Bulgarian or Polish as a foreign language, as well as for a wider readership interested in these languages. The article outlines the main qualities of this lexicographic work, discussing its history and methodological foundations and the approach adopted to the representation of contemporary vocabulary.