Archive for News

Six more dictionaries published

(October 2016) Congratulations to the compilers of six dictionaries newly-published this year on Webonary.org from July through September.

webonary1_0

Read the full article at sil.org.

Fifty-six down; forty-four to go!

(March 2016) As of 1 March, fifty-six dictionaries are now available on SIL’s Webonary. Newly published are Burkina Faso Kusaal DictionaryDictionnaire Mbule and Dictionnaire Moore. This online resource gives minority language groups the ability to publish bilingual or multilingual dictionaries on the web with a minimum of technical help. SIL is aiming to publish 100 dictionaries on Webonary by 1 October 2016.IMG_20150601_112246

Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshops are a significant method of helping speakers of ethnolinguistic languages to create their own dictionaries. The RWC method revolutionizes the task of collecting words by using a systematic method to capture these words in a workshop organized in the language community. RWC workshops consistently achieve a total of 12,000 or more raw entries during a brief two-week period.

Read the full article at sil.org.

SIL focuses on services at 90th Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting

lsa_thunbnail(January 2016) SIL’s focus this year at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) conference was on the services SIL provides to the linguistics community. Several SIL linguists attended the 90th Annual Meeting of the LSA which was held 7-10 January in Washington, D.C. As part of its on-going involvement in cutting-edge linguistics, SIL has a long history of participation with the LSA.

Verna Stutzman, coordinator of SIL’s Dictionary & Lexicography Services team, demonstrated another service, the online Webonary, a repository where people can post dictionaries, in whatever stage of development they exist.

Read the full article at sil.org.

Dictionary projects make progress

bissa_barka_dictionary_group_working2(November 2015) Dictionaries provide a long list of benefits: a resource for students who want to know the meaning of an unfamiliar word, a reference for writers, a guide to standard spelling and a reference for the community’s traditional knowledge of local plants and animals. A dictionary can bolster a community’s pride in its language and compiling the words and definitions provides a tangible goal for mother-tongue speakers to work toward together. SIL’s Dictionary and Lexicography Services team is dedicated to supporting language communities around the world as they develop dictionaries for their languages.

Read the full article at sil.org.

SIL representative participates in Oxford Global Languages Symposium

verna_stutzman_at_oxford_symposium2(October 2015) A select group of experts recently gathered in Oxford, UK, to explore language and technology topics at an event organized by Oxford University Press (OUP). SIL’s Verna Stutzman, Dictionary and Lexicography Services Coordinator, was among the seventy leaders from various fields invited to participate in the Oxford Global Languages Symposium.

Following the symposium, Stutzman was invited to introduce the Rapid Word Collection method to an OUP team in a 90-minute online presentation. Read the full article at sil.org.