[A12n-forum] Fwd: OLPC Children's dictionary for African languages

["Don Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI. OLPC is the One Laptop Per Child project. The laptops will
include among other things, data from Wikipedia and as you can read
below, dictionaries in diverse languages (including African
languages). This is a request for volunteers to help.  Don

--- In afrophonewikis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sabine Cretella
<sabine_cretella@...> wrote:

Hi,

as you might already know OmegaWiki is creating the OLPC Children's
dictionary. To reach the first goal: 1100 basic words we are going a
way that is slightly different from what you would expect: we are
using a simple xls table to insert terminology. The table was created
by Zdanek who creates mainly dictionaries combining various wordlists
and he will help to integrate them. This means that completing the
lists should be quite fast. The definitions you find there in English
are not the ones from OmegaWiki - he just extracted them, mainly from
wordnet if I understand well. Therefore the definitions will need to
be checked as well. Since we are talking about basic terminology for
kids the meaning of the word should be quite clear and potential
questions might just be a few in the end.

So what we would like to ask this list now:

can you help to complete the list of 1100 words for the OLPC
Children's dictionary? At this stage I have an xls file so you can
work with Excel or OpenOffice.org on it. Of course all African
languages are relevant. Actually we more urgently need Kinyarwanda,
since this is one of the countries where the kids will get their
laptop first. All other languages are needed since step by step we
hope that OLPC will reach all African contries.

...

If you might have the possibility to create further connections:
please do so. Any help will be very much appreciated - in "all
languages". All languages is a lot, I know, but consider that by
having this data in OmegaWiki, that is in a relational database
fashion, it will be extended and improved over time and by using the
defined meaning concept we will have the possibility to create
dictionaries also in very particular combinations you would otherwise
never get. Furthermore your entries then can be used for spell
checker, for the first steps to Apertium
(http://apertium.sourceforge.net) and many more.

I am preparing the languages here (just started):
http://www.omegawiki.org/OLPC_Children%27s_Dictionary/Co-operation_with_dicts.info#Languages

In a second stage the 1100 words we have now will be extended to a
second and a third step so that we get a dictionary that over time is
suitable to really learn foreign languages by this kids as well.

And yes: we will need more people for one language, since it would be
nice if people helped with proof reading etc.

For who it can be interesting: we can hand over a certificate for the
co-operation on the OLPC Dictionary (through OmegaWiki) and also
create a stage if somebody adds for example the translations,
hyphenation, classification.

Thank you for your attention and time!

Best wishes from Italy!

Sabine

*****
Sabine Cretella
s.cretella@...
skype: sabinecretella

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