Munn Monthly - May 2021

Robin writes:

When you finish putting together a dictionary of a language, how do you get it into the hands of the people who speak that language? One way is to publish your dictionary as a printed book, but printing books takes time and money. Either you have to sell your dictionary, reducing the number of people who will be able to get their hands on it, or else you will have to find funding to publish it and give it away for free. Or you could publish your dictionary on a website, but that requires Internet access. And for many of the language communities we serve, Internet access is spotty in the very places where a dictionary would be most useful, such as in their villages.

But there’s another alternative. Even in less-wealthy communities, it’s amazing how many people have smartphones these days. And those smartphones are almost all Android phones: iPhones tend to be expensive, whereas a decent Android phone can be had for $150 or less. So if you could publish your dictionary as an Android app, it would reach a lot of people. Android apps might require Internet access to download them initially, but once they’re downloaded you can run them without needing Internet access. It’s even possible to share Android apps with other people with no Internet access at all, because they can be copied onto SD cards and then loaded from the SD cards into other phones.

So there are many benefits to publishing your dictionary as an Android app. The only drawback is that not many linguists have the necessary programming skills to create an Android app. That’s where the Dictionary App Builder software comes in. You run it on your PC and give it your dictionary data (exported from any of our software, like FieldWorks or Language Forge), and it produces an Android app for you! It essentially takes a pre-built “template” of a dictionary app and fills in the words and meanings from your linguistic data. The apps produced by Dictionary App Builder can also include pictures, audio clips for words or example sentences, and links between related words. It also automatically includes a search feature and indexes, including reverse-lookup indexes where you can tap on the meaning and be taken to the entry for that word (the normal or “forward” lookup index is the one where you tap on the word to go to the dictionary entry). If you choose to include audio files, Dictionary App Builder gives you the option of either including them in the app file (which makes the app file much larger, but lets it be used entirely offline once it’s downloaded) or storing the audio files on the Internet (which makes the initial download much smaller, but means that the app requires Internet access to hear the audio). But note that even if you include the audio files in the app so that the initial download is large, that still doesn’t mean that Internet access is absolutely required to get the app, because it can still be shared on SD cards.

To create an Android app with Dictionary App Builder, you just fill in all the details (app name, any audio or image files you want to include, the language(s) that the user interface will be available in, any special fonts needed in the app, and so on). Then you click on the "Build Android App" button and an .apk file (App Package) is created which you can distribute on SD cards, upload to the Google app store, or whatever you want.

As usual, you can click on any of these pictures to see a larger version.