austraLasia #908
Don Bosco's spirit top of the chart: language science reveals 'our' language
ROME: 16th October '04 -- Don Bosco's spirit. In the course of the past century, the most frequent phrase to cross Salesian lips! Closely followed by Don Bosco's charism, Salesians of Don Bosco, love of God for the young, our rule of life, project of life.
All natural human languages have a distinctive feature - words 'keep company' with other words. If we have a representative set of texts belonging to a language, it is possible, with the right software, to identify precisely which words keep company with which other words. These clusters often comprise three words and as many as five or six. Beyond that number, clusters are not well-defined. In almost every case, a defined cluster would have an invariable meaning in any context.
It does not take much to realise that these facts could be of inestimable value for several purposes: (1) given the right conditions, a translator can use one or two actions to replace a string containing anything up to 50 key strokes depending on the size of the words involved; (2) the most frequent clusters in the entire corpus will almost certainly identify the most important topics, in terms of regular use, for that language.
Without arguing the point about it too much, Salesian 'talk' can be regarded as a language. It has a range of some 600-700 distinctive terms (isolated thus far) and hence also a range of combinations or clusters of those terms with other words or amongst each other. A glossary of approximately 100 of the most frequent Salesian clusters now exists and is available for anyone who would like it. As with glosdben (which is mostly but not entirely single words) it is arranged alphabetically, not in order of importance.
All clusters listed have appeared in at least 80% of the total corpus of 227 official Salesian texts beginning from Don Bosco himself. Each cluster contains a word that has appeared at least 1,800 times in that corpus and as often as 9,000 times. Each cluster has appeared a minimum of 10 times and as often as 221 times in that corpus.
Clusdben, as it is termed, is of interest partly because it is not random, and represents the kind of company Salesian terms keep and have kept over 150 years. It can be downloaded quickly from www.sdb.org reserved area | file sharing. If people were seriously interested in letting it work automatically within MSWord for translation purposes, then they need only do two things: (1) strip the table format back to simple tab-separated format and save the entire file as *.txt (all that can be done within Word, Tables). (2) download Wordfast for free from www.wordfast.net and follow directions for installing it and using it, along with the handy manual that can be downloaded. It will make automatic use of your clusdben.txt. Wordfast can be used free for jobs up to 500 translation units (usually a TU is a sentence worth) which would do most people.
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'austraLasia' is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia-Pacific. It functions also as an agency for ANS, based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com Did you know that the POLARIS project is a Salesian-driven project? For further comment cf Lexisdb
austraLasia 907
A handy glossary - and practice at using the Reserved Area of the SDB Website
ROME: 15th October '04 -- As the Rector Major has been travelling for the past 24 hours to reach Australia, and after a few hours of rest has now joined the Provincial Council for its regular monthly meeting, there is little to report at present. Tomorrow he takes part in the Rectors' meeting where he will offer his thoughts on topics such as experience of God and the Salesian vocation, spirituality and holiness.
In the meantime, here is an opportunity to offer something that may prove to be very handy for the reader - a simple two-column glossary of Salesian words and phrases (Italian-English) that you can consult. While it is obviously useful for anyone doing translation, it may be of use for any Salesian who wants to check the meaning of a term that is in common Salesian use. It could be helpful for novices or postnovices in their Salesian Studies courses. It is one of the practical products stemming from the development of Lexisdb.
The glossary is a Word document, entitled glosdben.doc (glossary sdb English). Here is your chance, if you have not already made use of it, to go into the Reserved Area of the site, where a space is available to all Salesians for file sharing. If you have not as yet registered with the site, do so (follow directions on the Home Page of www.sdb.org ) - it will not take you long, and the response will be quick. Once registered, simply enter the reserved area, file sharing and download the file which will be immediately apparent to you.
Once you have your copy of glosdben, it's there to use as you wish. If you are looking for a term and do not find it there, please advise. The file will be updated whenever additions are made.
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'austraLasia' is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia-Pacific. It functions also as an agency for ANS, based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com Did you know that the House chronicle is something Don Bosco himself began? For further comment cf Lexisdb
