Challenges encountered:
- Lack of glossers, because scribes and team leaders were more urgently needed or glossers could not come due to personal circumstances. The second week there were enough glossers. Sometimes there were even glossers who didn’t need to sit in a table group and who could gloss folders from the previous week.
- Less than 5% of all the gathered words were glossed and typed by the end of the first week. Folders were left in the village with glossers so they could continue to work on them after the first week. The glossing backlog was eliminated in the second week and only folders for spell checking and typing were left at the end of the word-collection phase of the workshop.
- Many spelling mistakes, words in the wrong semantic domain and phrases that were translated literally from the English examples in the Questionnaire. Before the start of the second week a short lesson was given on phrases in order to avoid collecting unwanted phrases.
- Glossing is not easy, because words don’t have tone written on them, so it is not clear how to pronounce them. (If tone were written, nobody could read it.) Since words often ended up in the wrong semantic domain, even taking the domain into consideration would not always make the identity of the word clear. During the second week, the glossing was done in the word-collection groups, which made the glossing much easier. The pace decreased, but overall more work was accomplished.
The participants were encouraged by the number of words collected. The workshop was held during school holidays. Therefore the workshop could be held in a school. The lack of electricity was not a problem. The computers were able to last with their batteries. Students were available as scribes and it was possible to have 8 groups. During the training all people were trained for the different roles. This made it easy, for example, for a glosser to become a team leader. Or for a team leader to help a scribe who had difficulty with the writing.
Impact(s) of the workshop:
- the translators have a thesaurus and a way to check for spelling,
- the linguists have a list of minimal pairs for decisions regarding how to write them (since tone is not written),
- secondary schools have dictionaries (glossaries) for their mother tongue reading/writing classes,
- writers have a glossary
- people in towns can get the dictionary on their cell phone or
- access it via the internet (Webonary)
- people who want to read parts of Scripture that have been translated can look up words that they don’t know.
People were very interested in the results and were enthusiastic about the workshop. People came to watch; the churches provided lunch; a big part of the community was involved in making it a success.