List translation

Draft

Community

In this case study, the community we work with here is the Surui people, located in North-Western Amazonia.
It's a small population of 30 Amazonia forest's villages and 1,600 native speakers.
The languages they speak is Surui and Portugese, the national language of Brazil, at various levels.
Westernization is radically changing daily practices, culture and language.

Almir Surui, their elected chief, has been contacted and is willing to lead such effort.
Recent effort to preserve and revitalize their language are underway : they recently normalized Surui language's writing, elementary school is in Surui language, with associated new books.

There is no existing wordlist to reuse to record in Lingualibre.

Identify your source

Given their second language is Portugese…
Given academic researches recommending word list sorted by frequency…
And given we have such list in Portugese…
We will work with Surui natives to translate such Portuguese list into Surui :

List:Por/words-by-frequency-00001-to-02000 - les 2000 mots portugais les plus utilisés à traduire en Surui.

Identifying the translators

Your team of translators will need to choose its editing mode :

online via the "EDIT" button (you must create a Wikipedia account)
offline.

Linguistic specifics and creation phases

The Surui being very different from the Portuguese, we can advance in phases:

1st phase: this translation from Portuguese to Surui is adapted to a first massive effort, in order to produce 90% of the current vocabulary.
2nd phase: it will naturally be appropriate to complete these Portuguese-centered lists with lexicons and concepts specific to Surui and its environment. This supplement is a work of a different nature.

Qualitatively, this whole will constitute a solid bilingual Surui <=> Portuguese lexicon, and with Lingualibre, a multimedia dictionary.

Vocabulary list translation rules

The Surui list will ultimately be a single Surui wordlist ready to save. A few rules must be taken into account to carry out this effort properly.

1) We speak of L1 for the language to be translated (ex: L1 Portuguese) and of L2 for the added translations (ex: L2 Surui). 2) The format of our vocabulary list is as follows:

L1 (Portuguese) → L2 (Surui)

3) Keep the "→" sign, it is very important for what follows. 4) To the Portuguese L1 word on the left, we add as the L2 translation on the right its most common synonym. Example for L1 Portuguese → L2 English:

* que → that
* a → a
* o → the
* de → from
* não → no
* é → is
* e → and
* um → one
* para → to
* eu → me
* se → if
* me → me
* no →
* uma → one
* está → is
* por → by
* com → with
* os → the
* do → from
* te → you
* em → in
* ele → he
* como → like

5) Si un mot L1 il n'existe pas de traduction L2, passer au mot suivant, car nous souhaitons traduire le plus de mots possible. Exemple, "Arranha-céu" est ignoré:

* uma → one
* Arranha-céu →
* como → like

6) Si pour un mot L1 plusieurs traductions L2 très communes existent, dupliquer la ligne et traduire:

* como → like
* como → as
* como → similar to
* Monkey → Macaca
* Monkey → Macaco
* Monkeys → Macacas
* Monkeys → Macacos

7) Si pour un mot L1 de trop nombreuses traductions L2 existent, par variations, n'ajouter que la base. Exemple pour les variations verbales pour L1 anglais et L2 portugais :

* be → ser
* make → fazer
* move → mover
* build → construir

Nous traduisons uniquement la base fondamentale, nous ne détaillons les variations infinis :

* build → construir O
* build → construo X
* build → constrói X
* build → construiu X
* build → construímos X
* build → constroem X
* build → constroem X
* …

8) Si il n'existe pas de mot L1, et qu'il existe un mot L2 spécifique, ajouter une ligne et un mot après la flèche. Exemple, si le portugais n'a pas de mot pour "Penguin", alors:

* Papagaio → Parrot
* → Penguin
* Monkey → Macaco

9) Secret: les "trous" produits en 5) et 8) pourront être complétés plus tard.

Pour aller plus loin...

Les listes suivantes sont disponibles à la traduction vers le Surui, afin de constituer rapidement une liste Surui de base de 6 à 8000 mots Surui :

Coordination

Un second email est en cour d'écriture pour les aspects de coordinations relatif au 20 Mai 2022 à Paris.

Bien à vous,

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