Project for Free Electronic Dictionaries

Last week, I undertook a brief fieldtrip to Pine Creek and Kybrook Farm, Northern Territory, to present the completed Wagiman Electronic Dictionary to the Wagiman community.

It has been a long time coming as several of us have been working on this dictionary in our spare time for the last six months, and so it felt especially good to be able to see a finished product, and better yet, to give it back to the community. In that six months, we successfully integrated recent research into Wagiman plants and animal species by Glenn Wightman, as well as very recent work done by the CSIRO on fish species in the Daly River. The electronic dictionary now contains all that up-to-date information. We also managed to produce sound files for the majority of lexical entries in the dictionary. There are around 1250 sound files in the dictionary altogether, totalling some 15 minutes of high-quality audio.

Lardukkarl nganing-gin using the Wagiman mobile phone dictionary

The Wagiman community are very pleased with the dictionary, and all enjoyed listening to the marluga¹ who recorded each of the sounds. The Wagiman people were also excited to see the mobile phone version of the dictionary. It’s not quite as complete as the computer based dictionary; it contains far fewer sound files (around 300), and doesn’t contain the sometimes lengthy dictionary comments that accompany many lexical entries. This is an unfortunate constraint of the size of a standard mobile phone screen — too much information can be hard to navigate through.

I also met with representatives of the Northern Territory Department of Education, who were interested in supporting the dictionary and possible collaboration into the future. The Wagiman have given the tick, and the Department are going to go ahead and install the dictionary on all the computers in the schools in Katherine as a first step. We’re hoping that we’ll also be able to get the Northern Territory Library on our side and install the dictionaries on library computers. That way, most computers accessed by children and young adults in the area will have the Wagiman dictionary installed.

In addition to the computer- and mobile phone-based dictionaries, we have also been looking to produce a printed version. Hopefully the Wagiman community will be able to take advantage of the increased interest in Indigenous languages recently, and sell copies of the dictionary to tourists through various shops in Katherine, Pine Creek and Darwin.

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of this particular project is the demonstration that accessible electronic dictionaries for Indigenous languages can be produced for relatively little extra effort, provided that the language in question has been adequately described. Although for many languages, this remains a significant obstacle.

The Wagiman people have given us permission to allow the public to download a demonstration version of the Kirrkirr dictionary, which we will try to have ready soon. A full version will be available upon request to the Wagiman community.

This is probably very short notice, but James and I will be presenting Wunderkammer, WKimport and the project in general at a Linguistics Department seminar tomorrow evening at the University of Sydney. Here are the details:

Monday 1st June
4 pm - 5.30 pm
Eastern Avenue Seminar Room 119

Wunderkammer, mobile phone dictionaries and the Wagiman electronic dictionary

James McElvenny and Aidan Wilson
The University of Sydney

ABSTRACT

In this talk we will demonstrate Wunderkammer, software that allows electronic dictionaries to be stored and displayed on mobile phones. We will show how we have used the software to produce a mobile phone dictionary of Wagiman, an Australian language from the Daly River Region in the Northern Territory. We will also discuss how other linguists can use the software to make their own electronic dictionaries available on mobile phones, as well as the future possibilities for dictionary delivery in technologically under-resourced areas.

Wunderkammer was recently presented at the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in Hawai’i. A summary of the presentation can be downloaded from the online proceedings of the conference.

Das Wunderkammer-Benutzerhandbuch ist jetzt in deutscher Sprache verfügbar.
(The User’s guide to Wunderkammer is now available in German.)

Wunderkammer and wkimport are now available. Wunderkammer can be used to display dictionaries on mobile phones and wkimport can be used to import electronic dictionaries in a variety of formats into Wunderkammer. See the wksite for downloads and documentation. There is also an online demo so you don’t need to download the MIDlet to your phone to see it working (although the online demo lacks sound).