Bilingual Dictionary Generation


HUMANITIES COMPUTING LABORATORY

One of the powerful new enhancements in the WinCALIS family of applications is support for user-generated on-line dictionaries. On-line dictionaries are created by the lesson author and can be used during a lesson to look up the meaning or translation of a word. Depending on what is installed on a particular workstation, WinCALIS, WinCALIS Author, or UniEdit (the WinCALIS Multilingual Text Editor) can access an unlimited number of Unicode-text on-line dictionaries.

Because of the flexible, Unicode-compliant nature of the WinCALIS interface, adaptation between languages is simple. This allows the on-line dictionaries to be either polylingual (e.g., Russian-Arabic, Arabic-Russian), or monolingual (e.g., a dictionary of specialized vocabulary for advanced students of English). Any author can generate a dictionary by creating a (Unicode) text file in WinCALIS Author or UniEdit and generating an index.

We completed the compilation of an on-line Korean-and-English dictionary for Special Operations Forces at Ft. Bragg, NC. The thumbnail images displayed on this page lead to screenshots of the dictionary at work. Please contact us if you are interested in accessing this dictionary for your WinCALIS or UniEdit. We are interested in undertaking the compilation of new bilingual dictionaries and in adding audio and graphic illustration enhancements to the dictionary engine. For example, an Arabic-and-English dictionary which permits the user not only to look up a word, but also to hear it spoken in Classical Arabic and in any of the major modern dialects.

We hope that with the collaboration of interested WinCALIS authors and users, we will be able to develop and distribute useful dictionaries to accompany WinCALIS for a wide range of languages. If you are interested in contributing to the generation of such dictionaries, please do not hesitate to contact Richard Kunst (rkunst@humancomp.org) at the location below.


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