Capturing phrase books and dictionaries

[Lech Rzedzicki <xchaotic@gmail.com>]

Hi.


We're trying to keep our markup close to DB5 but we also want to
tighten the schema a bit further.
One area we're particularly struggling with is phrase books and
dictionaries. This was originally modelled using TEI and reflects the
actual structure quite well.
The problem we have is that both in the original language portion
(form) and in the the target language explanation (sense) we need to
allow many optional elements such as example, pronunciation, often
multiple times (as there can be many forms or senses or many examples
for each sense or form), gradually this led us to a very complex and
loose model which also doesn't maintain the relationship between the
original and translation too well.

I was wondering if any of you have any experience dealing with similar
content and whether you could share your experience and schemas?

Thanks in advance,

Lech