EAO, 24 April 2022 -- In 2019, a meeting of EAO translators from the Salesian Family meeting in Myanmar produced a print version of the Salesian Dictionary, including a focus on Salesian terms that originate in this region. EAO as a region contains, interestingly enough, almost half of the world's estimated 6,000 languages, and includes Chinese (Mandarin), the language with the most native speakers in the world at an estimated 1.12 billion native speakers. English, however, is the most widely spoken language in the world with an estimated 1.135 billion total speakers. Of course, the EAO Salesian Family does not speak 3,000 languages. At most it speaks about several dozen of them, and because of the charism's origins in northern Italy, Italian has due importance too. The Salesian Dictionary began as a largely bilingual dictionary – most terms provided in Italian, and their equivalent and all subsequent explanations in English.
It was not long before the Dictionary went digital, made available on bosco.link, and it has had thousands of hits and downloads, so people obviously have found it of value.
Now there is an entirely new upload of the Dictionary, which has grown exponentially in content and potential as a ready reference, a handbook of all things Salesian, and a tool that can assist translators. One or two local dictionaries have now been included (for example, a Chinese-Italian-English glossary, put together some years back but never fully incorporated into the Salesian Dictionary). In fact the Dictionary has become so extensive and offers such a wide range of possibilities, especially for the translator, but not only, that it has been renamed as SED or the Salesian Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Most terms now have a Chinese language equivalent, and Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and French equivalents have also been added in many instances.
You have two possibilities for accessing this dictionary on bosco.link:
- You can access it directly in bosco.link at https://www.bosco.link/eao_doc/SED_20220424.html
- You can download your own copy (it is a single html file) from the post announcing the upload at https://www.bosco.link/sc/77322
The SED has been left completely 'open', meaning that not only can you download it, but you can make your own changes to it should you wish to do so, and have at least a basic understanding of how to do that. And in fact, if you wished to add your own language equivalents for terms and then send those to the bosco.link team, you are warmly invited to do so.
If you do download the file (it is a zipped file at about 4.5 Mb which expands to around 12 Mb when unzipped), you would be advised to retain the zip download version, just in case you do attempt to make changes and get a bit lost in the process. That way you always have the original to go back to! If you do wish to make changes but are unsure how to do it, then just contact the team at eao@bosco.link and someone will be in touch with you immediately to explain how to go about it all.
