Is Contemporary Turkish Dictionary (Güncel Türkçe Sözlük) user-friendly?

Most situations that interest human beings transferred to electronic (virtual) platform along with the developments of information technology. So people no longer meet or speak in this virtual platform and they can meet each other both audible and visual; they do shopping, pay the bills, and join the clubs or association and also they enroll in a school and they can even receive a diploma from the distance education programme without going to school. But people use this important virtual platform mostly to enjoy and to reach the information using their tablets, mobile phones, and computers. People follow their friends’ movements and events in the world on social networking site (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and they read hot news from online newspapers or they search for the questions in their mind and they can immediately find answers for them. So virtual platform becomes active in almost every side of the life. Virtual environment producers who know the common and effective usage of this environment, they try to create an evaluation criterion called user-friendly to form a practical field. In this criterion there are some features like “to be able to adapt the visuals sent to different other devices and scanners, easy accessible tabs, a thema without eye-straining and a good web design that help the user where they search and what they find. In the study which is based on the problem statement “Is Contemporary Turkish Dictionary user-friendly?”, a comparison was done between the content of the most famous online foreign dictionaries (a kind of database prepared according to users’ need) were chosen randomly and the content of Contemporary Turkish Dictionary in terms of a lexical item (“dictionary”). “Dictionary” lexical item was written in these dictionaries, given information was analysed and they were sorted out according to comparative analysis. So the similarities and the differences were determined, the deficiency of it was found out and some suggestions were offered to be more useful dictionary (user-friendly). At the end of the study, it was seen that there are a lot fields that must be developed in the dictionary. For instance; it doesn’t allow to get the dates from different environments, similar words list can’t be seen by the users, and when there is an incorrect witting, it can’t lead the user to the closer form, it doesn’t include the words’ level (A1, B1 etc.) and it doesn’t let the user to look for the words having inflection. These deficiencies aforementioned should be eliminated.

Keywords

Contemporary Turkish Dictionary, user-friendly, the arrangements of the dictionary contents.