Monica, the Lexique Pro!

For the past two weeks I have been working on one thing—dictionaries. Well, they are not full dictionaries, but rather long word lists that the people working here in Mozambique have compiled. I have been assigned the task of taking all of the hard work that other people have done and making it into something that can be handed to people and distributed across the country. First we had to standardize the list of words and the way they are numbered, run all sorts crazy lingalinga programs on them, import them into Lexique Pro, a computer program that has decided it is my arch nemesis and finally export them into different formats so we could have them as PDFs and in HTML. I did this for 16 languages! Lexique Pro even played nice long enough for me to print them with pictures! We also created one master lexicon that has Portuguese as the head word and has glosses for all sixteen of the languages in the same entry! It was pretty exciting stuff. I’m really glad I got to work on this and I might even be able to take a class on Lexicons and Dictionaries next semester in Brazil!