Publisher's Note

The Dictionary Development Process

In December 2014 SIL International, Nepal (www.sil.org/asia/nepal) and HIS-Nepal conducted a Rapid Word Collection workshop in Kathmandu, Nepal. Around thirty Syuba speakers participated in this two-week workshop. Participants learned a process of rapid word collection using a systematic process of elicitation by semantic domains developed by SIL (www.rapidwords.net). By the end of the workshop word collection was completed in 1800 semantic domains, each collected Syuba word was given a gloss in Nepali, and all the data was keyboarded using a program called FieldWorks Language Explorer (or FLEx, for short) (https://fieldworks.sil.org/flex/). Following the workshop two Syuba speakers continued to edit and expand the dictionary, a process that has continued by dedicated editors up to the point of publication now. Draft copies of the dictionary were sent to the community for feedback and corrections that were integrated into the dictionary.

Our desire from the beginning has been that many people from the community would contribute to the dictionary, and that the result would be freely available using the popular Creative Commons License (www.creativecommons.com). It is our hope that this dictionary will continue to be developed and expanded in the coming years, and that it will be a significant milestone for the ongoing development and standardization of the language.

SIL has been privileged to play a small part in helping to bring forth the Syuba-Nepali-English Dictionary (2015) to showcase and promote the richness and diversity of Nepal’s languages through this dictionary development process. We look forward to serving many more language communities in Nepal in a similar way.

Daniel Watters

Country Director

SIL International, Nepal