Friday 29 March 2024 00:34:44 PHT

Launching More Philippine Dictionaries

IJsselstein, Tuesday, 28 October 2008

The dictionary section is one of the most popular parts of this site. In cooperation with Project Gutenberg, we are busy adding more dictionaries to help learners and speakers of Philippine languages.

Kaufmann's Visayan-English Dictionary

Bohol.ph today officially announces the availability of Kaufmann's Visayan-English Dictionary on-line. To avoid confusion: this is a dictionary of the Hiligaynon (Ilonggo) language, as spoken on Panay, and in the province of Negros Occidental. Produced by Rev. John Kaufmann, a Mill Hill Missionary based in Igbaras, this dictionary was published in Iloilo around 1934. This dictionary, in spite of its age, is still a great resource for students and speakers of that language. Since John Kaufmann died on 1 September 1942, this work is now in the Public Domain in the Philippines, and may be freely reproduced.

The dictionary can be found at this location:

http://www.bohol.ph/kved.php.

General comments on this dictionary are welcome in the comment box below.

Wolff's Cebuano-English Dictionary

Our next target is to add a high-quality Cebuano dictionary. For this we selected one of the best dictionaries ever made for Cebuano: Professor John U. Wolff's Cebuano-English Dictionary, published in 1972. Its publisher, Cornell University, has dedicated this important work to the Public Domain, so we can use it here. Professor Wolff, now an Emeritus Professor, supports our digitization effort.

For now we need help from volunteers and students to correct the text derived from page-images using OCR (optical character recognition) software. To help, you can follow the following steps.

  1. Go to the site pgdp.net
  2. Register yourself as a member (link in top right of welcome page), and sign in.
  3. Carefully read the proofreading guidelines.
  4. Go to the P1 (Proofreading Round 1) page. (link in top left of activity hub page).
  5. Locate the dictionary in the available projects list. (Search for Wolff in your browser)
  6. Open the project page for the dictionary.
  7. Carefully read the special instructions for this dictionary on the PGDP wiki.
  8. Start proofreading, cleaning up the output of the OCR software.

The dictionary will go through no less than five rounds of proofreading, so in the end, we will have a digital text with a very high level of accuracy. This text I will use to create a searchable interface similar to that for Kaufmann on this site.

If all regular users of this site will help proof just one page a week, we will have the dictionary available for all next year!

Jeroen Hellingman

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