Dictionary English Sindhi
Hermila Farquhar
Compilations of Sindhi and English terms were created for non-Sindhi speaking students in the early 1800s.[1] The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta published articles with vocabulary lists in 1836 and 1843.[1] Sindhi was one of the languages included in Leech's 1943 vocabularies of Indic languages for the British government.[1] In 1849, George Stack published a Sindhi to English dictionary consisting of 15,000 terms, followed in 1855 by an English to Sindhi dictionary with 17000 terms, in which he used the Devanagari script.[2] Father G. Shirt published a Sindhi to English dictionary in 1879 in which he used Arabic script and which became the basis for a number of other versions, including Parmanand Mewarm's 1910 and 1933 works.[2] Beginning in the 1960s, Deccan College began work[3] on a dictionary with both Devanagari and Arabic characters which included contemporary usage and cross references.[2] Sirajul Haque Memon was the chief editor of the Oxford English-Sindhi Dictionary.[4]
Yadgar Sindhi to English Dictionary is a reference work edited by A. D. Shah and Zulfiqar Ali Bhatti and published by Yadgar Publishers.It is a bilingual dictionary and contains over 8000 English meanings of Sindhi words.[5]
There are various simple definitions of the term dictionary given by the various authors according to their writing experience and their intellectual approach. In brief, Dictionary is just like a reference book which provided the meaning and additional information such as pronunciations, origin etc. [1]. With advent of technology the use of dictionaries has seen a paradigm shift from hard copy based book, to digital applications available on computers, online or in cell phones. A pictorial or illustration based dictionary uses pictures or drawings to illustrate and visually elaborate what the desired word means. Generally pictorial dictionaries are organized by the topic instead of being an alphabetic list of words [2]. Pictorial dictionaries include a small corpus of words, minimizing the dictionaries size and complexity. The reason is that these dictionaries hold only those words which are represented and elaborated with their pictures [2].
This paper shows the implementation of Java built framework that is not dependent on any third-party software or plugin. This system can be run on any computer platform with any underlying operating system, as its completely built using Java with its platform independent features. The development of such dictionaries and their provision through Pakistan's National Digital Library would highly facilitate the research work on Sindhi language, literature and linguistics [7].
This paper is further divided into four main sections. In the next subsection we discuss the research and source of various reference materials obtained for this project and later the main aims and objectives of this paper. The section two elaborates the design and methodology of this research project. The graphical user interface and project workflow is discussed in section three whereas section four presents the project evaluation. Finally conclusion and future work is given in section five with acknowledgment in the end.
One of the major aims of creating this type of application is to provide a digital dictionary which is based on Sindhi Unicode. This will greatly help to provide convenience in using this application and displaying Sindhi text on old system that are not updated and are available in under developed Sindhi Schools. The Unicode provides a standard platform for displaying Sindhi text Glyphs and typing Sindhi text without additional external plugin support.
This application is very much efficient in retrieval of lexis (words) because we have not involved any third party plugin (any database) that adds its own delay for the retrieval of words, because the control will be passed to it and it will execute the query for the retrieval.
This application does not require any additional Sindhi fonts. This is one of the specific criteria which will be appreciated by everyone. As it uses Java technology with Unicode character system, the need of specific fonts to display character glyphs is no longer required and Sindhi text have been made compatible with standard default fonts available in all computer systems.
This application is platform independent which means that this can be used everywhere, on every system. Its use is not restricted on any specific platform as it uses java virtual machine as its underlying architecture.
To collect the images/pictures of the words and meanings, some of the small pictorial dictionaries are studied [21] along with MSN-Encarta [20]. We also used Adobe Photoshop tool to design images at our own. Most of the images were generally obtained from google images.
Our system implements Hash table to save the data instead of any conventional database. A hash table or hash map is a data structure that uses a hash function to efficiently map certain identifiers or keys (e.g., person names) to associated values (e.g., their telephone numbers). The hash function is used to transform the key into the index (the hash) of an array element (the slot or bucket) where the corresponding value is to be sought [23].
The main purpose of using hash tables over other data structures is speed. This advantage is more apparent when the number of entries is large (thousands or more) as aimed in our project to incorporate at least more than Fifty Thousand words in the dictionary. The other reason is that the Hash tables are particularly efficient when the maximum number of entries can be predicted in advance, so that the bucket array can be allocated once with the optimum size.
The methods declared are for saving and retrieval of English Word, Sindhi Word, English Meaning or Sindhi Meaning and finally fetching image or picture for the corresponding word. This same class would be used for both categories of dictionary that is Sindhi to English and English to Sindhi Dictionary. With record of each Sindhi Word, its relevant information is saved in the Dictionary Database bean as object and then the record is put into the hash table. Finally the entire hash table object is saved into a file for permanent storage usi/ng Object Serialization.
As discussed the project consists of two sections; Administrator and User Interface. The administrator section is consists of two internal sections, English to Sindhi dictionary and Sindhi to English Dictionary. The admin of the application selects which dictionary type he wants to work on as shown in Figure 6.
The Figure 8 shows the main GUI of the administrator page. The UI has been designed so that the data can be entered and saved quickly and easily. The user is able to insert dictionary records with word, meaning and also load an image file. The administrator can easily traverse the previously entered records, along with editing and deleting the invalid entries.
The second section of the project develops the GUI for the end User. The administrator page will only be available to the developers for them to quickly and easily enter the database records. However the User GUI will be distributed publically for the general use. For the General public a simplified welcome screen is designed as shown in Figure 9.
It is essential here to mention that the project does not use and copyrighted images and sources. We have ensured that all the data and pictures are obtained from open source and free with non-copyrighted mediums.
It is observed that in the projects of dictionaries, whether English, Urdu or Sindhi, it is very much necessary that such type of application projects should be user oriented. To achieve this goal we firstly settled meetings with reputed educational personalities, and the various editors, got their notion on how should our Sindhi dictionary be implemented. The second major criteria which we have considered in developing this application is how we can make this dictionary more and more easy for new users especially for children because our application is mainly developed for school children, young Childs and also for people living in rural areas. We also met with some project developers for the suggestions and guidelines in order to work in right directions. After that we studied various projects of the same criteria that have been made for other languages, studied their design methodology and mechanism as discussed in [25] for Pictorial dictionary of Ancient Athens, for printed Farsi subwords [26], Arabic [27] and finally we look into document image database [28].
Finally we conducted usability test and survey amongst students by letting the students use the dictionary and latter asking them to fill in simple questioners regarding the dictionary. Figure 11 shows the results of the usability survey. Amongst the 100 students that were asked to take part in the evaluation, 55 showed complete satisfaction with only 10 being unsatisfied by the system with certain reservations.
We sincerely thank all those who helped in various ways throughout the development of this project. We sincerely thank the students who took part in aiding in the development especially in developing the database and inserting the records; namely, Mohsin Ali Soomro, Irshad Ali Palal, Pir Farhan Ahmed and Rashid Ali Solangi.
Addressing the ceremony, former Sindh University vice chancellor Mazharul Haq Siddiqui highlighted the need for dissemination of scientific knowledge and awareness in common man to tackle climate change effectively.
He said that advancement in science was taking place at a fast pace and, therefore, translation of latest works into Sindhi and other languages had become essential. He lauded the role of the WWF-P and efforts of Dr Dharejo in bringing out the pioneering dictionary.
SLA had published 15 dictionaries on various themes and it was planning to produce another 20, she said, adding that Sindhi scholars should come forward and extend their cooperation and assistance in translating scientific material into the Sindhi language.
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