Two peculiar dictionaries of Latvian

Estonian-Latvian dictionary (ed. Valts Ernstreits) and Latvian-Estonian dictionary (manager of the project Arvi Tavast) have been published at the same time and with the same design. Each of the dictionaries consists from more than forty thousand headwords, however they are not of the same size, Estonian-Latvian dictionary has significantly more pages. The reason is the Estonian-Latvian dictionary is a traditional bilingual dictionary, were we can find among other information a lot of illustrations for the use of translated lexis. Latvian-Estonian dictionary could be probably called an experimental dictionary. It is compiled on the basis of the parallel corpus, the lexical materials have been mostly processed automatically using specialized software, professional lexicographers did not participated in the compiling of this dictionary. As a result this Latvian-Estonian dictionary seems more like a glossary, we do not have examples of the use of translated words in this dictionary. What is very strange is that quite a lot of headwords are not words, they are groups of words. This experimental dictionary demonstrates that software alone still is not able to compile a dictionary of high quality without the help of experienced lexicographers.