The Shahi dictionary uses social-media websites and language tools to provide photographic and visual results for language queries. How could we extend it’s use to the Ngarluma language?
Back in August last year I wrote a blog post about some of the Social Media workshops that we ran in Roebourne in WA. For those who missed it the original post is here. One of the workshops was with Andrew Dowding and Tyson Mowarin who make up the Language and Culture unit at the Ngarluma Aboriginal Corporation and we developed a Visual Dictionary for the Ngarluma language using Flickr. Last week Shakthi sent around a link to another visual dictionary. It’s called Shahi and you can find it at:
What I love about this dictionary is that it is a tool that builds on existing resources, namely, Wiktionary, WordNet and Flickr. The entire tool is a program that leverages those websites to create entries for the dictionary. It made me think about what it would take to create the same tool for the Ngarluma language. Would you need to recreate Ngarluma versions of WordNet and Wiktionary? Perhaps you would only need to create some kind of translation machine for English to Ngarluma so that you could enter a Ngarluma word, it would get translated to English then sent to the Shahi dictionary to get the corresponding picture, an English definition could also be provided.
Andrew had told us about a Ngarluma language dictionary project, so perhaps an English to Ngarluma dictionary is not far off. I’ll find out more and report back.