Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 12 • July 2004
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A Glance at Porto Editora Graciete Teixeira
It was founded in 1944 by Vasco
Teixeira, my father, who managed to interest a group of teachers in his idea
of creating high-quality schoolbooks. Motivated by a commitment to promote
high standards in education, the company was highly successful, and an
independent organization developed from the visionary project. Over the
years, Porto Editora established itself as a leading educational publisher,
and in the process underwent periods of great change, which, in fact, mirror
the major transitions within the Portuguese society.
The need for high-quality
printing at specific periods of the year soon resulted in buying a printing
house, Bloco Gráfico, which, to this day, takes care of all production. From
the beginning, a large amount of money was invested in advanced typesetters
and printing machines, which allowed for high efficiency and regular
production. In the late 1990s, a modern building was designed to fit the
increasing printing turnover, with innovative technical capacity, and an
automatic warehouse. Our products are distributed by
ourselves or by subsidiary companies, Arnado, in the central area of
Portugal, and Fluminense, in the south. This policy allows us to be present
all over the country. Meanwhile, the implementation
of new technologies has caused us to step into multimedia products, providing
the Portuguese market with educational and reference CD-ROMs and DVDs. Our
presence on the Internet is both institutional and commercial, with a
bookstore online and four sites addressed to students, parents and teachers.
Since 2003, we offer a paid service – Infopedia.pt – with encyclopaedic
articles, dictionaries and multimedia resources. Dictionaries at
Porto Editora
The publication of the first
edition of the Dicionário Editora da
Língua Portuguesa (DELP)
took place in 1952, as Vasco Teixeira soon realized dictionaries were an
essential part of culture. That year really marked the beginning of a trend
in dictionary making that has prevailed up to the present. New editions of
Portuguese dictionaries, as well as bilingual dictionaries for English,
French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Modern Greek, Polish,
Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish and Latin were launched, providing
the market with learning tools that have grown increasingly popular among
students, teachers and the general public. At first all the work on
dictionaries was done on paper, and relied on the author’s capacities.
Authors were chosen by their reputation and language competence, and many
titles appeared. It soon became clear that the process and quality should be
controlled in-house, and, as a result, some of the staff became
lexicographers. This was suitable for that time, as entries were
hand-written, notes were kept in a system of card-based inventory, and texts
had to be manually typeset. New editions were revised using the same hard
time-consuming methods. When I joined the company,
coming from a translation service where I had done a lot of work in
terminology, I had a strong feeling that we need to control the content much
more than the form – as was the practice until then – if we wanted to
maintain our leading position in dictionaries and be able to face the arising
competition. So, in the mid-1990s a new dictionary division was set up and a
whole new team of lexicographers was recruited. Most of them went through
training programs, while they developed their own skills as language
researchers, as at that time there were no university courses on lexicography
in Portugal. By then the dictionary program of the company had, as its prime
concern, the formation of in-house, full-time skilled staff, and the
development of editing software for dictionary making, using available
computer technologies. It took a few years before the work done in the
dictionary division became almost completely automated: dictionaries were
converted into databases, information was gathered and tagged so as to permit
data retrieval, and there was a huge investment in electronic devices for
storing information and optimizing the productive process. We were very happy
to produce our first dictionaries coming directly out of our database in
1998, and we took the opportunity to redesign the cover and change the
format, though maintaining the colour orange which immediately identifies
Porto Editora’s dictionaries in the Portuguese market.
The use of databases allowed us
to produce three complete CD-ROMs: Portuguese, English and French, including
dictionaries of verbs and introducing other features. At the same time, we
put DELP online for free, then English/Portuguese, Portuguese/English,
French/Portuguese and Portuguese/French dictionaries. A Portuguese illustrated
dictionary, dictionaries specially created for primary school students and
substantial revisions of different dictionary ranges were undertaken, helped
by the advance of new technologies. Today, our policy is to produce
the most updated dictionaries suitable for the target users. Thus, DELP has
the year of publication on the cover for the past two years, in order to
stress its actuality. A brand new masterpieceFor the 60th anniversary of our publishing house this year, we decided
to publish a dictionary of one volume, including the main work done by Porto
Editora on the Portuguese language database, and thus to create a new
lexicographical reference book in Portugal. Our Grande Dicionário da Língua
Portuguesa appeared in May 2004. It presents the actual state-of-the-art
of the Portuguese language not only in Portugal, but also in
Portuguese-speaking countries including Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde,
Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. This important
geographical coverage includes a large degree of common language, as well as
special domains. Grande Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa It was a great challenge to coordinate the collaboration of many
specialists who updated our databases and introduced new concepts in different
areas, from mathematics to medicine, music or biology. This specialized
revision was done on paper, and our lexicographers were in charge of dealing
with the experts, adapting their explanations to a dictionary definition and
finally introducing the new version in the database. Besides, our
lexicographic team treated common language entries and some areas of their
knowledge, such as linguistics or literature. With its prestigeous physical
features, the Grande Dicionário
stands as a symbol of the company’s long experience in dictionary making and
of its high standard of quality. PE Group details Dictionaries in numbers
K Dictionaries Ltd |
