BOLD:PNG

 
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Copyright © 2010 BOLD:PNG Project; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
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Overview

Introduction

Contents

  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Purpose
  3. 3 Objectives
  4. 4 Deliverables
  5. 5 Project Constraints

There is a pressing need to document the world's linguistic heritage
while there is still time. The consequence of language shift is that
many genres -- and many whole languages -- are quickly falling out of
use.  Professional linguists are compiling grammars and dictionaries, but this is painstaking work, and is not keeping up with the pace of language loss.  This project is addressing the problem by training university students and literacy teachers to collect and curate oral texts from indigenous languages.  The focus is on Papua New Guinea, which has 830 languages, many having fewer than 500 speakers.

Purpose

  • To preserve audio recordings of the indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea, for use by current and future generations of speakers, scholars, and teachers.
  • To identify effective techniques for recording, transcribing, and translating oral texts, using inexpensive equipment and voluntary labour.
  • To encourage speech communities to value their linguistic heritage, and to pass on their ancestral language to future generations.

Objectives

1. Equip educated language speakers in the technique of Basic Oral Language Documentation (BOLD).
2. Collect 10 hours of oral texts in each of 100 languages, and apply the BOLD methodology to this collection, during a 12 month period.
3. Edit and publish a corpus of transcribed oral texts.

Deliverables

a) Training materials for Basic Oral Language Documentation, delivered at UOG, DWU and UPNG.
b) 10 hours of speech recordings (approx 100,000 words) for each language.
c) 1 hour of respoken and orally translated text per language.
d) 10 minutes of textually transcribed and translated text (approx 1,000 words) for each language.
e) The above materials collected and archived with the PNG National Research Institute and with PARADISEC.

Depending on funding, there will be two further deliverables:

f) A selection of the archived materials edited and published as an electronic corpus.
g) A selection of the archived materials edited and published as a book (e.g. a narrative and a dialogue in each of 100 languages)

Project Constraints

The success of the project depends on the voluntary effort of language workers to collect, transcribe, and translate oral texts.  Since there is no funding, all the work must fit alongside the existing responsibilities of participants.  Participants are expected to contribute the equivalent of one full-time week of labour.  It is assumed that the primary recording work can be done during a period of two weeks (1 hour per day for 10 days).  Respeaking and oral translation take no more than 10 minutes for each minute of primary recording, but it is done for just 10% of the primary recordings (a further 10 hours of work).  Textual transcription and translation take no more than 100 minutes for each minute of primary recording, and this is done for just 1% of the primary recordings (i.e. 10 hours of effort).  Thus, these people contribute the equivalent of one week of full-time effort.

The period set for this project is 12 months, 21 Feb 2010 - 21 Feb 2011 (UNESCO International Mother Language Day).