HBT 207 is contributing towards the destruction of rainforest.

Prologue: Finally, last post before the end of February! My blog had been deserted for quite a while! And by the way, check out Kimi Chong's take as well regarding this particular HBT207 assignment that we all did!

Dear *insert any names of supreme being or the BIG guy*,

I had committed a sin to mother nature.

So there was an assignment in HBT 207: Lexicology and Terminology that require us to produce a dictionary regarding topic of our own choice, complete with cover, method of usage and entries of words. Of course, since all of us are just a bunch of amateur translator cum linguist cum lexicographer etc etc in training, we were only required to produce a dictionary which contain 3 entries. Just 3. Sounds easy, right? Here's the catch.

Methodology of building a dictionary starts with building our own corpus of words, sorting it out into wordlist using a very nifty software called Wordsmith and identify the occurance and usage of a particular word of choice in individual sentences/corpus. Until now, it still sounds easy right? Since we are using a computer software to aid us in building the dictionary. Here comes more catch.

We need to build a corpus of 50,000 words. The source text can be taken from the internet or from printed text (but of course have to type it into digital form). Still, it sounds very easy right? Since internet are abundant with all source you need.

Did I mention about the what medium of language that we need to use for this dictionary?

We need to build the dictionary in Bahasa Malaysia. BM.

OH SHYT. There goes my original idea of doing a Animanga Dictionary. (It will take forever to collect text related with Animanga culture in BM!!)

I had a rocky start for building this dictionary. At first, I was thinking of doing Kamus Perundangan and even started building a smart corpus about it. Then I thought, this topic is way too common and someone else will be building dictionary for the same topic too. So this topic were forfeited. And I spend quite a while pondering about a more interesting and niche topic.(...ok, I procrastinated most of the time but almost everyone did too!) Then I settled with Nuclear energy (tenaga nuklear) because there was a news not long ago that Malaysia is considering using nuclear energy as a source of electricity. So I went on to build the corpus for nuklear, using text from internet. But not for long, I hit more stumbling block...

The text related to nuclear energy (mind you, in BM) are pitifully little. And the topic was a little way too niche as well. The corpus building come to a sudden halt again. The pondering continues...until one week of deadline (the deadline was on 25 of Feb, btw)...that's the time where everyone will feel the crunch and start scrambling to catch up with time. By hook or by crook, I need to make a decision soon. Recognizing nuclear energy as a relatively clean source of energy (provided that it is handled with care and the nuclear reactor didn't explode in and releasing tonnes of radioactive dust), I expanded the topic further to become Clean Energy, to include other renewable and clean source of energy for example hydroelectric and solar.

...but where should I find the source for my corpus.

After observing how my other coursemates collect their text for corpus, I discovered that almost all of their text (again, it must be in BM) came from only a couple of major sources. Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian and other Malay language newspapers' website. I mean, is there any other place that you can find a huge collection of article written in BM under one website?! So one more round of corpus building, this time for real, commenced...

Sitting in front of the laptop, copying and pasting articles into wordpad (wordsmith only accept text file) can be very tedious and boring. It makes you wonder, How could anyone involve in lexicology as a profession?! I read from wikipedia's page about Oxford Dictionary that they have a very dedicated group of volunteers in reading through all text material and proofreading and etc. They actually have volunteers?! And while I am building the corpus, the overall theme of all the text that I collected slowly shifted towards renewable energy in which nuclear energy, despite being clean, isn't. Again, again and again, I am swayed by this fact and the corpus for nuclear energy slowed down in order to concentrate in collecting text for renewable energy and topic related to it...

Anyway, after the boring process of building the corpus (and ironically, the amount of individual texts reach 207. I collected 207 text for HBT 207) that I collected it finally came down with the real thing: building the dictionary. Building the cover page was a breeze and I referred to real Oxford Advance Learner dictionary regarding on the method of usage. Now, the entries.

This the the front page that I did. Neat and green, right?

According to the correct procedure, we are suppose to choose the word that we want to do as an entry from our wordlist depending on the number of occurance while derive the meaning from the concordance which highlight the particular word along within sentences. (with the higher the frequencies the better, minus item that are not related with the topic.) After using wordsmith to sort the wordlist, the result is somewhat dispersed and one sided. The word with highest frequencies: tenaga of 1000 plus occurance. The other words that I planned to do as an entry only reached 200 plus by most and hovering around 100.

In the end, I choose to proceed with these 3 entries: tenaga (with tenaga boleh diperbaharui as sub-entry), empangan (with empangan hidroelektrik as sub-entry) and solar (with sel solar as sub-entry). Finding appropriate meaning (with a little help from the dictionary that we have ourself) and searching appropriate illustration for the entry and voila! 3 entries done! But things didn't end here...

We are suppose to print out the wordlist and concordance as well as the link from the webpage as reference and support material for the entries. So checking back to my wordlist and concordance... (and since wordsmith can only safe file in txt form as well, hence need to cut and paste into word doc for printing) To my horror, the full wordlist in font size 12 reaches...132 pages. Same thing with concordance which totals up to 60++ pages. The reference page (just a series of url of the website which I grab the text from) reached 16 pages as well. Immediately I went OMFGWTFBBQ. Oh my MONEYS. Oh the PAPERS. OH the TREES!!!!

To counter this situation, the obvious thing that anyone will do is to reduce the font size in which I resize all of this into font 8. Wordlist reduced to 120 plus page, concordance to 50 plus and reference 12 pages. Still the bloody wordlist had the most page. Next: compacting them into two rows within one page. But then I realized even if I did that, the number of pages for wordlist will still reach 60 and it is still quite a lot. Not to mention cut-and-pasting a very long list and breaking it down properly into two row in one page is extremely tedious. While I am in the process, MinMin chatted with me in MSN (Btw, I always online when I turn on my laptop to do something.) and she mentioned that there is no need to print all of it. And man, what a realization it is. In the end, I just took the word with frequencies 6 and above to be printed and removed the rest of the long list. It reduced to mere 20 plus pages. Hurray! This is more like it. (It also means that word with only 1 occurance actually occupies 2/3 of the whole world list!) With everything settled, I finally took a well needed rest and went to sleep, after decided that I will print everything and binding it in oneshot over the photocopy shop...

The next day, as any usual assignment deadline day, I went over to the photocopy shop first thing in the morning (because I don't want to get stuck in the rush hour throughout the rest of the day.) to print out the final product. Despite trying so hard to reduce the amount of pages, the final outcome still manage to make me go OMGWTFBBQ. The result? Just see it for yourself.

The final product, gleaming from the reflection of the plastic cover.

...and it is THIS thick. (compared to my index finger) 107 pages thick. So, RM10.70 gone. (10 cents per page, black and white. Dang, I should have printed the dictionary part in color cos I used green to highlight the entries as well as the front page)

What makes me go WTF though is the fact the real flesh that actually makes the worth of marks only constitute this little (merely 11 page) while the rest of it are just reference and support materials in the form of wordlist and concordance.

This has to be thickest assignment that I ever produced through all this while and will still be on top even when I graduate. And top it off, a couple of my coursemate actually made thicker folio...those who accidentally printed all the wordlist and concordance without adjusting the font size and alignment etc.

Obviously in the end, we can conclude that: 1. with some many papers used in printing all of these (remember, there is 50 plus of us in BATI), I can imagine that our carbon footprint increased drastically as well as accidentally aided in the destruction of rainforest across the globe. and 2.: the photostate shop under the library must have earned shitload of money that morning since it's assignment deadline day with so many people printing dictionaries.

Hence the title for this blogpost today, HBT 207 is contributing towards the destruction of rainforest.

Epilogue: LOL just a slightly satirical take of mine for this assignment. Meanwhile, the pile of assignments are still waiting to be done...what assignments do I have for this week? And look forward for more post coming up, peeps *hopefully*!