Himalayan News Service

Lalitpur, February 17:

A project for the first ever Nepali electronic dictionary was launched today.

The three-year-long project — Bhasha Sanchar — was launched under coordination of Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya ( MPP) and Tribhuvan University with support from various foreign partners.

There are around 40,000 speakers of Nepali, and is also widely spoken in the neighbouring countries. Yet, the Nepali language is not supported by software/dictionary.

“In the Bhasha Sanchar project, we will rectify this by updating and extending the current Royal Nepal Academy dictionary, adding to previous work at MPP, and developing a software that works in Nepal,” said president of MPP Guthi, Kamal Mani Dixit, adding, “The dictionary that will be prepared will be freely available.”

The MPP is doing a survey of potential users of the Nepali software in order to better understand their needs.

This data will form the Nepali National Corpus, and will provide a firm foundation in Nepali as it is actually used.

“We will also gather examples of spoken Nepali, and with help of linguistic analysers a text-to-speech generation will be developed. This is essential for access to computers by those who cannot read, the visually impaired or illiterate,” said Dixit.

Professor Patt Hall of the UK Open University and Professor Tony McEnery of the University of Lancaster said it was a good effort and the project would establish linguistics for Nepal at a level comparable to European languages.

The substantial work is being undertaken in Nepal by MPP and TU with expertise from Europe, with the overall management being done by UK.

The project’s lead partner is the Open University of UK along with MPP. It is supported by the Linguistic Department of the Tribhuvan Univesrity, Lancaster University and Outside Echo in the United Kingdom, Goteborg University in Sweden, European Language Resources Association from France, and Limerick University in Ireland.