Times have changed over the last ten years in terms of dictionary production. With the introduction of digital support and networking, the lifespan of dictionaries has been considerably extended. The dictionary manuscript has become a unique data-source that can be reused and manipulated many times by numerous in-house and external experts. The traditional relationship between author, publisher and user has now been extended to include other partners: data-providers - either other publishers or institutions or industry-partners - , software developers, language-tool providers, etc. All these dictionary experts need a basic common language to optimize their work flow and to be able to co-operate in developing new products while avoiding time-consuming and expensive data manipulations. In this paper we will first of all present the ISO standardization for Lexicography which takes these new market needs into account, and then go on to describe the new standard ISO 1951: -“Presentation/Representation” of entries in dictionaries- which was published in March 2007. In conclusion, we will outline the benefits of standardization for the dictionary publishing industry.

Market surveys have pointed out translators’ demand for integrated specialist dictionaries in translation memory tools which they could use in addition to their own compiled dictionaries or stored translated parts of text. For this purpose the German specialist dictionary publisher, Langenscheidt Fachverlag in Munich has developed a method and tools together with experts from the University Rennes 2 in France and well known Translation Memory Providers. The conversion-tools of dictionary entries (“lemma-oriented”) in terminological entries (“concept-oriented”) are based on lexicographical and terminological ISO standards: ISO 1951 for dictionaries and ISO 16642 for terminology. The method relies on the analysis of polysemic structures into a set of data categories that can be recombined into monosemic entries compatible with most of the terminology management engines on the market. The whole process is based on the TermBridge semantic repository (http://www.genetrix.org ) for terminology and machine readable dictionaries and on a XML model “LexTerm” which is a subset of Geneter (ISO 16642 Annex C). It illustrates the interest for linguistic applications to define data elements in semantic repositories so that they are reusable in various contexts. This operation is fully integrated in the editorial XML workflow and applies to a series of specialist dictionaries which are now available.