isiZulu.net Zulu-English dictionary

What is it?

isiZulu.net is a collaborative Zulu/English online dictionary. It has a forum where everyone (that is YOU!) can contribute new entries. It also tries to be a place to promote the Zulu language and to build up a modern vocabulary. To achieve that it depends on your input and feedback.

What is it not?

isiZulu.net is not a full text translator. However, it tries to translate simple phrases and compound Zulu words (isiZulu is a very "computer-friendly" language in this regard). It is also not a Babelfish, so don't try to feed it with German, Afrikaans or Kiswahili words.

Why is it?

This dictionary started out as an idée fixe shortly after my first visit to South Africa in late 2003 where I had set my mind on wanting to learn Zulu. Obviously there were no isiZulu evening classes up here in Germany, so I bought some course books from "teach yourself" and African Voices and Doke's bulky but dusty printed Zulu/English dictionary (aka Ye Olde Doke, still unfortunately the main reference for the database).

After a while I noticed that there was no isiZulu online dictionary around, just a few word lists and one or two dumb web frontends. So I decided to develop one myself. It should have a real database behind it, some more or less intelligent lookup code accounting for the agglutinative nature of isiZulu, and a forum to allow users to contribute entries. The latter was an idea that I actually borrowed from the LEO guys. :-)

Lazy as I am, I didn't feel like coming up with a database schema of my own. Looking for someone who had already done that for me, I stumbled across David Joffe's dictionary compilation software TshwaneLex. It was about as beta as my site at that time, which I thought were best preconditions for a beta-testing and cross-referencing agreement. :-)

African Voices kindly allowed me to use their course vocabulary as an "initial stuffing" for my database. And after a couple of weeks of typing and coding like crazy, isiZulu.net saw the light of day. It's happily online since June 6, 2004, currently (2009) channelling a few thousand lookups a day through about 200 kB of home-grown Perl code (no PHP inside!).

Who is it?

Just me and a few regular expressions. :-) And you folks on the forum of course!