This newsletter features Rapid Word Collection workshops in Cameroon and several newly published dictionaries on Webonary.org. March 2016.

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Congratulations to the compilers of these newly published dictionaries:
Please check them out.

Burkina Faso Kusaal Dictionary	http://kusaal-bf.webonary.org/
Dictionnaire Mbule	http://mbule.webonary.org/
Dictionnaire Moore	http://moore.webonary.org/

There are 56 dictionaries published on Webonary as of March 1, 2016. There are 7 months left for the challenge of having 100 dictionaries on Webonary by October 1st. That means publishing around 6 dictionaries per month to meet the challenge.

Rapid Word Collection workshops in Cameroon

Rapid Word Collection Workshop in the Bambalang language at the Central Baptist Church in Cameroon

By Kevin Warfel

SIL Cameroon’s Bep Langhout and Valerie Hamm received training in 2015 to lead RWC workshops. This investment of Verna Stutzman’s time in Cameroon brought forth abundant fruit in a short amount of time, as Bep oversaw workshops in three languages (Kemedzung, Chungmboko, Sari) by the end of December and has just begun a fourth (Naami). Valerie also facilitated a workshop in Chrambo in January. This represents around 40,000 words.

These workshops generated a lot of enthusiasm in the respective communities, as summed up by an elderly Chungmboko woman: “To think that I have lived to see the day that my language would have a dictionary!”

Check out reports of other RWC workshops at http://rapidwords.net/reports.

DLS Advisory Board meeting - Feb 24, 2016

Present:

Brian O’Herin, Chair, Linguistics
Verna Stutzman, DLS Coordinator
Kevin Warfel, Assoc. DLS Coordinator
Albert Bickford, Sign languages
Bob Bugenhagen, Eurasia
Mike Cochran, LSDev
David Frank, Americas
Julie Green, Anthropology
Sue McQuay, Publishing
Gary Simons, CRO
Dennis Walters, Asia
Catherine Young, GLPS Director

Agenda items:

Verna Stutzman reported about what's been happening in Dictionary & Lexicography Services since the last DLS Advisory Board meeting:

The 2016 wildly important goal (WIG) of publishing 100 dictionaries online (Webonary.org) by October 1st is moving forward both in service maturity and in number of dictionaries.

Fieldworks Language Explorer 8.3 is getting closer to being released as an Alpha version, which includes a re-worked Configuration Tool and a user-interface to publish directly from FLEx to Webonary.

The Lexicography Tools planning meetings held in Dallas in February went very well.

Two people are now on board as Lexical Data Conversion Specialists, Cynthia Mooney and Katrina Wolinski.

Brian O'Herin shared about the possibility of using the Cornerstone management system for Lexicography Consultant Certification.

Albert Bickford shared about the progress being made on the development of SooSL, which is dictionary software for sign languages. He recently presented it at a major sign language linguistic conference and got very good reviews.

PanLex 02016 internships

from Jonathan Pool

The PanLex team is accepting applications for summer internships at our project headquarters in Berkeley. PanLex interns will get training and practice in various aspects of our work making billions of lexical translations among more than 10,000 languages and dialects publicly available. Details and an application form are at:

http://dev.panlex.org/intern/.

Rapid Word Collection Questionnaire
The Rapid Word Collection questionnaire is available in nine languages at http://rapidwords.net/resources (scroll to the foot of the page). Check to see if it has been translated into the Language of Wider Communication which you use in your project. If not, you may volunteer to do it.

If you would like to publish a dictionary on Webonary.org, please fill out this application form. If you already have your dictionary on Webonary.org, but it has not been made public, please send me an email, verna_stutzman@sil.org.

It is relatively easy to publish on Webonary.org if your lexical data is in Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). If you are using an older program like Toolbox or software that is not designed specifically for Lexicography and you need help converting and importing your lexical data into FLEx, please send me an email, verna_stutzman@sil.org.

SooSL software for creating sign language dictionaries. For more information, see http://soosl.net

Dictionary App Builder 1.0

Here is a preview:
http://software.sil.org/dictionaryappbuilder/hometemp/

Please download version 1.0 and let us know if there are any major issues to fix.
Many thanks!
Richard Margetts, SIL Francophone Africa