UNDP Lexicon Project

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) has a number of Electoral Support Projects in the Arab region and one of the many things they are doing is to produce a tri-lingual lexicon of electoral terminology in Arabic, English and French. Its primary focus is to provide definitions of 500 or so terms in Modern Standard Arabic Arabic and at the same time, reflecting the differences in local language use around the region. There are currently 8 target Arab nations participating in the project each of which have their own local expressions for many terms. The English and French provide a second language of reference.

The project Adam Hyde (founder of Book Sprints) is involved in the first regional edition. An initial project produced a bi-lingual lexicon in Tunisia two years ago. It was created using microsoft word and desktop publishing softwares. The main problem that arose using this toolchain was that it was an unwieldy and linear production ‘workflow’ where tracking and tracing changes in multiple documents (operated on my multiple contributors and translators) became a huge burden for the project. In addition, many terms had to be updated in the desktop publishing environment. Add to that right to left character sets mixed with left to right character sets and you have yourself a serious headache.

So for this new more ambitious project, Adam, together with our developer Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Barquero, built a web based software (free software which will soon have its own site etc) using HTML as the base file format and using various ‘modern technologies’ (sockets, nodeJS, BookJS and contenteditable etc for those that are interested) to enable concurrent additions, comments and editing of translations by the team of 12+ or so involved (spread across many countries) in realtime. The output of the lexicon can also be tested at anytime using tools to convert the HTML to book formatted PDF (and EPUB) at a click of a button.

The software was iteratively built as the project progressed. I would say that it is not elegant but it does do the job. It will also improve over time.

While this is not the core work of Book Sprints it is an interesting example of collaborative book production over the web in a reasonably treacherous environment (character sets, low bandwidth access, concurrent edits etc) but the result (it will be published in April) is that the work is progressing much faster than the previous tedious MS Word, email, and DTP combo. Feedback from project co-ordinators can’t believe the efficiency gains and the burden that has been lifted from their shoulders. In fact, put simply, the project manager told me it would have been next to impossible to do this without the collaborative approach. The participants in the process are loving the interactive aspect of us because we also built a discussion space where they can exchange ideas and double check meanings.