•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

A young programming hobbyist has come to the rescue of those eager to use precise Indonesian terms, instead having to fall back on foreign languages, by creating a 24-hour online service that goes beyond just being a dictionary.

Ivan Lanin, executive director of Wikimedia Indonesia, has created a site called Kateglo — a descriptive acronym that brings together the three main attributes of the Web site: kamus (dictionary), tesaurus (thesaurus) and glosarium (glossary).

The site, www.bahtera.org/kateglo, launched a beta version on May 9 but the main version will go live in August.

“I’ve always wanted a site that could do all three things — find a term in a field, find a definition of a term and find the similar words. And, of course, all in electronic form,” he said. “The site aims to help people while promoting our national language.”

Ivan said that people sometimes find themselves stuck with an English word because they cannot find the most accurate Indonesian translation.

“People like me, who need to write exclusively in standard Indonesian, have had difficulties in finding the correct Indonesian term,” he said.

“A site like Kateglo should be very helpful,” he added.

Terms such as evergreen or blogger, he said, are rarely translated into Indonesian even though the words for them existed. “We have an Indonesian term for evergreen, it’s malar hijau .”

The contents of the site are mostly based on the standard Indonesian found in the Ministry of National Education’s Language Center online dictionary.

He also got input from his friends at the Bahtera mailing list, a list for Indonesian translators and language experts.

The site, although still in beta version, already gets about 1,000 hits a day. Ivan aims to keep on improving the site, which currently provides definitions, synonyms, antonyms, terms and a glossary of terms related to specific fields, for example, biology.

As of yesterday, the site contained 191,064 glossary entries, 71,024 dictionary and thesaurus entries, and 1,961 proverbs.

Kateglo is an open-source application and the contents are licensed so users are permitted to copy, distribute or adapt its contents as long as it is not used for commercial purposes.

Ivan intends to use special contributors in much the same way they are used on Wikipedia, because, he said, language is a consensus of the language users themselves. “In the future, I want the site to be edited by people, just like Wikipedia,” he said. “We will select the people as the site should only be edited people who are credible and understand the issues.”

Ivan said there was much work to be done before the August launch, including developing the user contribution concept, securing a license from the Language Center so terms could be copied from the site and developing a more attractive and user-friendly interface.

And he has to keep the contents updated. “So I will need more help from Indonesian language experts,” he said.