March 11: Word Collection Day #3

3285 words collected by the end of Day 3

The Bissa Barka continue to make good progress in their word collection, topping 3000 words by the end of the day today. For the first part of the morning, the typists also decided to help the glossers, who had quite a stack of work waiting for them.

Typists and glossers working together to translate words into French

Word-collection group #5

These beams of sunshine, however, were diminished somewhat by two “clouds” that appeared during the day. First thing in the morning, we had a bit of dissension in the ranks, as one of the most vocal members of the entire group complained to me that the glossers/translators were striking out words that their group had collected just because they didn’t know how to translate them into French. He was concerned that real Bissa Barka words would be excluded from the dictionary as a result. I assured him that I would talk to the glossers once they were all there to make sure that they were not doing what he thought because he was certainly correct in believing that they should not be crossing out words for that reason. (There are numerous valid reasons for them to cross words out, but that is not one of them.) (I later learned that he had also complained to Pam, Alphonse, and Thomas!!)

When I talked to the glossers a short while later, I learned that, while they were not crossing off words for the reason they were being accused of, they were crossing off words simply because they had already come up in another semantic domain. I explained to them that a thesaurus or thematic dictionary needed to have the same word in multiple domains because words are often used in a variety of contexts. A knife, for example, is something found in a kitchen and is also a tool used for cutting. Excluding the word from one of those domains would mean that the person using the dictionary to get a list of all cutting tools would not find the word for knife, or the person looking for a list of things used in cooking would not find it listed there. They seemed to understand that logic and agreed that they would no longer strike off words simply because they had translated them before.

Glossers working together to translate Bissa Barka words into French

The second “cloud” came in the middle of the morning, when I was informed that a woman who had been serving as scribe for one of the word-collection groups had gone into labor, so a replacement had to be found for her. At the start of coffee break, I was told that she had delivered a stillborn child. That was very sad news. Pam and I accompanied Pastor Alphonse to the maternity ward of the local clinic to express our condolences and pray with her. I later learned that she had been pregnant with twins and that one had been stillborn, while the other died soon after birth. It was especially sad for this woman because she and her husband had apparently been trying to get pregnant for some time before succeeding. They have a 5-year-old child and were really looking forward to this new baby. (I’m not sure if they knew she was carrying twins or not.)

The glossers and typists are taking their jobs very seriously, not only providing French translations and typing data into the computer, but also checking to make sure that words are in the correct form for a dictionary, that they really belong in the semantic domain where they were written down, that they are spelled correctly, and that they are real words and not just ones that someone made up on the spur of the moment. Words may legitimately be crossed off or corrected in some way if they violate any of these principles. The down side of the level of vigilance exhibited by the administrative team is that they are a bit behind with the translating and typing. There is not enough of a backlog yet at this point to be too concerned, but if they continue to fall further behind, something will need to be done, so I’m keeping an eye on the situation.