A HAZARDOUS ENTERPRISE OR A DARING CHALLENGE? A transliterated Hindi-Hindi-English dictionary A small Dutch-Indian team undertook the laborious effort to develop an unique transliteration standard for the Hindi language and its syllabification. To emphasize its usefulness and uniqueness, a computerized transliterated Hindi-Hindi-English dictionary was compiled, which is now available in print and on CD-ROM. Today there is a proliferation of English language daily newspapers and periodicals with an ever increasing circulation and readership throughout India. All these publications use terms from Hindi and other Indian languages to better express the local context of essentially Indian situations. The Indian words appear in these publications in Roman script. Therefore, a new type of dictionary providing a proper definition of these words and an indication of their pronunciation, based on a transparent and consistent system of transliteration, was urgently needed. With this approach in mind, a dictionary has been compiled that could be useful to the foreign readers of Indian articles, to the offspring of the Indian migrants who can speak but not read the Devanagari script as well as to the Indian, who due to the diversity in language and script, is not familiar with written Hindi. (Transliterated Hindi-Hindi-English Dictionary, London 1993. Allied Chambers, ISBN 81-86062-10-6.) SALIENT FEATURES The first of its kind, this dictionary enables even those who are not familiar with the Devanagari script to look up definitions with the help of the transliteration. Searching is facilitated by the arrangement of the words according to the Roman alphabetical order. The dictionary lists approximately 70.000 main and subentries. A wide range of Hindi idioms, sayings and proverbs have been included. The impact of Western civilization has created the serious linguistic problem of expressing a vast and ever increasing number of new concepts for which no words in Hindi exist. Reluctance to borrow wholesale from European languages has spurred efforts to coin in immense numbers technical terms for almost all fields of knowledge. This dictionary contains seven thousand technical terms. Characteristic mythological names and their related idioms, sayings and proverbs do find a place in this general diction- ary while the more specific meanings of those entries are dealt with in the Mythology supplement which contains a large array of names built around the main Hindu epics, the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. A collection of Anglo-Indian words can be found in a supplement of the same name. For the user with knowledge of the Devanagari script a word- index in Hindi - Transliterated Hindi has been included. The words in this index will be found in the dictionary under the transliterated word to which they are referred, thus facilitating a two-way use, as a Transliterated Hindi - English dictionary as well as a Hindi - English dictionary. TRANSLITERATION The Indian alphabets were standardized for computer usage by the Department of Electronics (DOE) in 1986. The developed alphabets cover the main Indian scripts, however they still make use of many diacritical marks. The team understood that an absolute accurate phonetic reproduction of the sound-system of Hindi would have been preferable from the scientific point of view, but we did also realize at the same time that this would have caused the introduction of a rather large number of diacritical marks and difficult phonetic symbols which are confusing and complicated for the lay user. Hence, as the practical use of the language made other demands, but still keeping in mind the scientific rules, the team developed a transliteration that is limited to the use of two diacritics, thereby observing as much as possible the basic rules of ordinary character replacement. SYLLABIFICATION Syllabification is unknown in the Hindi script, the normal practise being to break off at the end of a line. Due to the complexities involved, the team preferred to consider syllabification as a set of conventions according to which written words are hyphenated rather than as a set of rules systematically derived from a standard pronunciation. The team designed such a set of conventions for the Transliterated Hindi of this dictionary and hope that these will form (after due revision) the basis of a subsequent standardization. HINDI DICTIONARY ON CD-ROM This dictionary is available on CD-ROM as the first Indian multimedia title ever published. Multimedia is the medium of the future. Superb search facilities and compact storage option have increased its popularity. The following features have been built in for the user: A three-way search method (via Transliteration, Hindi, or description) has been provided and a hypertext like structure is built in, enabling the user to browse through the text and click on any of the highlighted words. This way the user has the freedom to choose his or her next selection without having to return to the main menu. Hindi text in Devanagari can be retrieved with the use of the ISCII keyboard as developed by the Department of Electronics, India. The second option is based on phonology, developed at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. MULTIMEDIA TITLES RELATED TO SOUTH ASIA December 1994 an English-Hindi dictionary can be expected, and during the second half of 1995 a CD-ROM on Hindu Mythology will be published. Subsequently other multimedia titles related to South Asia and India in particular will follow. Together with the Leiden based Inter Documentation Company (IDC), a project group has been initiated for this purpose. For further information please contact: Gateway Productions BV Hoogte Kadijk 109 1018 BH Amsterdam Tel/Fax: (31) 206267479