Wednesday (Day 4 of the word-collection phase) came to an end here in Malaysia about 7 hours ago. I didn't stay up to see how late people worked, however. All I know is that the Lotud participants in this workshop have been going back to work after the evening meal each evening, so as to maximize the benefits of getting together as a group. That alone makes me feel good about having come here to help point them in the right direction.

When I said 'good night' to everyone at 8:00pm, more than 3000 words had been logged in the record-keeping spreadsheet. (That's where we keep track of which group did which categories (semantic domains) and how many words were collected. Entering the actual words in the lexical database is a separate, and later, stage.) At first blush, having collected 3000 words with only one day of word collection remaining seems like an underachievement, since we usually talk about a minimum of 10,000 words as a result of one of these workshops. But upon further reflection, that result is quite encouraging.

First of all, a normal RWC workshop involves two weeks of word collection, which amounts to about 9 full days of work. This workshop is only for one week (or 4 days of actual word collection, due to the initial day of training), so equates to approximately half of the normal time that we expect the work to go on. That means that our normal expectation of 10,000 words should be reduced to half, or 5000 words. Furthermore, we normally have 6 groups collecting words, and this week we've had only three. So that cuts expectations in half again--to about 2500 words. In that light, having collected more than 3000 words already, with most of another day of work still ahead (the closing ceremony will shorten the work day today), is a very positive accomplishment. So I'm encouraged by that, as well as by the determination of the participants here to do as much as they can during the time they are here.

The only discouraging thing remaining is the fact that there are many words that have been collected that are still being processed (adding one-word translations in both English and Malay, and entering the words and their meanings into the computer). This probably means that we will use at least some of the three days allocated for cleaning up the data we've collected to continue the translation and the data entry. But that's not so bad. When Verna and I leave here, I think we'll be able to look back on the time we've spent here in a positive light, having left the Lotud people with a good start on the dictionary they've been wanting to create.