SIL FieldWorks Language Explorer
Last release: version 7.0, released August 2011. Go to http://fieldworks.sil.org.
User Feedback
These comments are based on Language Explorer 2.4.1 (FieldWork 5.4.1):
From the second day of the [FieldWorks] course I saw that the program would have a great simplicity of use thanks to it's design. Despite my slowness for computer and technical things, I can say that I have learned to use this program. I even helped other participants with their problems. I am encouraged with the collection of data and research. My amazement continues to this day seeing all that these programs can help us to do especially 'Language Explorer', 'Phonology Assistant' and 'Data Notebook'.
Adakou Azoti March 2009, translated from French
The program is user friendly and very powerful. I like the Interlinearisation tool for texts, very ingenious and useful. The help files are useful and I found myself referring to them a lot. Previous knowledge of Shoebox helped me in my use of this program.
Andrew Wilson March 2009
I really like this software. It is much more relaxing to use than [older software] because it seems to me to be more intuitive to use and much simpler to set up a project, not so susceptible to inadvertent errors resulting in puzzling problems. I was able to just start using it without any Help.
I really like the way you do the interlinearization, inserting analysis as you go. I have only done a couple of lines of the text, and from that I can see that there are a number of procedures to look forward to. I don't want to stop!
T. Dale Nicklas, March/April 2009
I have only worked with FieldWorks for about a month and find it most invaluable for both documentation and language analysis.
Dr. Shanthi Nadarajan, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, Center for Language Studies, University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), May 2009
Before our translation project switched to using FieldWorks, data entry and management had to be done by us, the expats. Now that the project is using FieldWorks, the national team members are able to edit the dictionary, enter in texts, and even interlinearize the texts themselves! The user friendly interface of this software makes it so that the work load can be shared by more people. In addition, the team has been utilizing the multi-user feature of the program, so at times we've had more than one person working on the data at the same time. This was never possible before.
Stephanie Richards, March 2009.
This user commented on Language Explorer 1.3.
I have been a satisfied user of Language Explorer (FLEx) since I began using a beta version a couple of years ago, and now have Version 1.3. FLEx makes it easy to format a dictionary and see how it will print out. A few months ago, I printing four copies of the current version of the Dizin dictionary and gave them to a few mother-tongue speakers who will make corrections. I was surprised by the extent of their gratitude.
FLEx includes many excellent educational resources. For me, reading about clitics in Andy Black's Introduction to Parsing (under Help, Resourses) gave me reason to change my analysis of some Dizin prefixes. This is leading to some orthographic improvements.
The program does still crash on occasion, and still doesn't have all the features I'd like it to have, but it is a major step forward from what was available before. And I know that the developers are working hard to improve stability and are adding the features that are most requested by users. I expect that FLEx will serve many, many linguists well for many years to come.
Marvin Beachy, SIL Ethiopia, Nov. 2007.
We received the following comments from people who were using Language Explorer beta 0.7 and 0.8 in 2005-2006.
I've had a dream--lexicography software with tools specifically designed to easily and efficiently collect data and develop a database. FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) is the realization of that dream. With tens of thousands of lexemes in a language, efficiency is not a luxury. The Bulk Edit tools in FLEx efficiently handle massive amounts of data. For the first time I have an easy to use tool that eliminates much of the tedium. Now I can concentrate on analysis and decision making.
Ron Moe
Having just been to a Language Explorer workshop and seen the powerful bulk edit function, it is clear that we now have a tool that makes processing lexical data collected with Ron Moe's Dictionary Development Process (DDP) doable. Before it was only possible for the few who were familiar with the CC program.
Robert Hedinger, Linguistics consultant, SIL Cameroon
It is much more stable. I am actually able to work in it profitably, and I don't lose anything when it does crash. It looks good and I find it intuitive a lot of the time when I want to do something new. Often, when I try something new, it behaves just like I think it should. I don't have to try very hard to figure out how to get it to do something. I haven't found myself doing something I can't get out of… GOOD JOB and be encouraged… The program is becoming practical now and I think folks will really like it.
Heidi Rosendall, Language Applications Software, Nigeria
I'm really impressed with this program, and I have barely scratched the surface yet. It is easier to work with than LinguaLinks was, so I am expecting to stick with it if I can figure out how to use some of its power and features. The main area I am struggling with at the moment is Grammatical Function. This does not seem to be straight forward yet. As far as Grammar and Texts are concerned I have barely touched them yet, although I hope to do so before too long. I am mostly working on the Lexicon at the moment. And I am hoping that there will soon be a way to export that to an .rtf file or something that can be formatted in Word for publication. I am hoping to be able to prepare a dictionary for use in the language area within a year or so. But thank you for all the hard work you have put into this program, and, incidentally, for all the help you have given to get me started.
Bruce Hooley
What excites me most about FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) is that it will enable SIL to publish linguistic data in a way never before possible. SIL has long been known as a leader in descriptive linguistics but actual descriptions are widely scattered and in many different formats. As SIL linguists begin processing their data in FLEx we will see benefits to our language teams in learning from what others have done as well as a huge benefit to the international linguistic community as they begin to have more and more data available to them. Language communities will ultimately benefit as well since published data on endangered languages will in many cases result in raising the prestige of these languages.
David Ker, Task Force for Lexicography, SIL Mozambique, specifically working with Nyungwe (nyu), a Bantu language of Mozambique
FieldWorks lets me use all the writing systems I want for the language I am studying and the languages I use to talk about it. The database design nearly eliminates duplication of information. My anthro data and lexical data are actually in the same database. FieldWorks makes it hard to make mistakes and easy to recover. Even if the program crashes, it doesn't corrupt my data.
Dennis W., East Asia
FLEx does a good job of handling right to left text in the interlinear tool. It is our team's choice for doing discourse analysis on our texts.
The integration between grammar and lexicon and text is great. It's easy to go from one to the other and back again.
One of the big strength's of FLEx is how the data is normalized. For example there is only one copy of a morpheme in the system, if I decide to change the spelling or the gloss of the morpheme, that change gets recognized by all parts of the system that reference that morpheme. Unlike "flat" storage systems, I don't have to do a search and replace in all my texts or lexicons when I have a change to a morpheme.
RL, Eurasia
The bulk edit functionality is really great. I already used the Bulk Replace function this morning and saved myself a heap of work. The definitions in English of all verbs were originally stated as "to X", as in "to shout". Then they were entered "shout, to" so that a reversal would alphabetize on "shout" rather than "to". I no longer want it done this way. The Bulk Replace function allowed me to strip ", to" out of all definitions. I was going to have to do that by hand on many hundreds of entries. I just did that also for the gloss field (which was just a copy of the definition field) and the job was done in about a second!
Paul Frank
This morning I had a chance to see a demonstration of the Lexical database editor of Fieldworks and I was very impressed. This is the component of Fieldworks that many of you have said you have been waiting for, in order to complete your dictionaries. And it is near completion…
My impression of the lexical database editor is this: Imagine having a program that has the ease of operation of Shoebox with the complexity and power of LinguaLinks, with the ability to generate a dictionary as you are translating, and generate a grammar sketch as you build your dictionary. That is what I saw this morning.
Some of us who are using LinguaLinks will see many familiar features. Fieldworks has incorporated many of LinguaLinks' best features and has fixed those that made the program difficult to use, such as: The annotation editor in LinguaLinks was a catchall for grammar data, etymology data, encyclopedic information, bibliography, usage, and data that you would not want printed in dictionary. This problem made LinguaLinks for PLB use very difficult. This has been fixed in Fieldworks. All this material are in their own separate places. The second difficulty with LinguaLinks was with entering text into the interlinearizer. This is now very easy to do in Fieldworks. Another problem with LinguaLinks was with the relation database editor. It is a nice feature but unless one had been trained and made lots of notes, it was difficult to remember how each relationship was to be entered. This has now been made very easy to do in Fieldworks.
Other features of interest to all whether you presently have lexical data in Shoebox or LinguaLinks are:
- There is the ability to generate a lexical database from your translation through the Translation Editor.
- A second feature is the ability to generate a grammar sketch in publishable form from the information entered into the lexical database. This was very impressive.
- Fieldworks has incorporated Ron Moe's semantic dictionary generating component into it. And because the user interface is much easier to understand, potentially it could be taught and used by mother-tongue language assistants.
- Another powerful tool in the lexical database editor is a feature called the Bulk Edit function. This feature has the potential to trim years off a dictionary compiler's time. LinguaLinks has this function too but one had to go "under the hood" of the program and write computer code in the right places (something I was taught how to do but was still over my head). Fieldworks has made this relatively easy to do through the use of filters. There is a learning curve but nothing like what was required with LinguaLinks.
- Another important feature with Fieldworks is that it uses Unicode…
Have I piqued your interest? I was very impressed with the program. I'm sure I only saw only a small part of what it can do.
Scott Burton, Philippines