Hello honorable audience and dear friends!
Dictionaries are an important tool in our learning,
life, and research for the accumulated knowledge that they contain.
Generally, we can evaluate a civil society
and a nation’s learning spirit by the quality of their dictionaries.
For this reason, today we invited several experts in this field
and would like to hold a conversation on the theme of “Dictionaries: The Containers of Knowledge.”
First, I would like to introduce our guest of honor for today:
Alim Heseni: Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; senior translator,
Husenjan Asqar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, senior translator.
Husenjan, there is more pain than enjoyment in dictionary making.
Why did you choose this field as your major?
Dictionary making is a tough job which requires patience, time and energy.
After my graduation, I was offered work in the terminology office of the Ethnic Language Committee.
Since then, I have been doing terminology work.
. The terminology office of Ethnic Language Committee, is responsible for terminology nomination, standardization, and publishing.
First, when we started the work, we published the terms that we standardized in different kinds of newspapers.
We published the new group of terms as soon as we standardized them.
Following the increased number of standardized terms,
we considered that we can make a dictionary with these standardized terms
and it will bring convenience for language personnel, translators, and language users.
Therefore, we sorted out the previously standardized terms and published a dictionary of Chinese-Uyghur terms.
After that, we published dictionaries on different subjects and fields.
Now, when I think back, my name first appeared in the dictionary of Standardized Terms
Dictionary of Computer Terms, and Astronomy Terms.
At that time, when I saw my name as the author in these dictionaries,
my heart was filled with pride and joy.
As we are terminology personnel
many publishers and related organizations ask us to check and review the dictionary that they made.
As time passed by, by the motivation of my passion in this field,
we made a lot of dictionaries come to this world in the process of making dictionaries,
helping others to make dictionaries, or organizing others to make dictionaries.
You have already made more than 30 dictionaries for students who are learning language. Right?
Student dictionaries should be small, not heavy, and easy to use.
It should have examples and pictures.
It should be convenient to put in your pocket or bag.
The dictionary should be related to the student’s class,
making it easy to find the new words and so on.
The students can use a large dictionary too,
is heavy so it isn’t convenient to bring it everywhere.
So we made it small.
Secondly, everywhere people talk about learning language, especially Chinese and English.
So dictionaries for students should be geared toward this.
The should be simple
The should be straightforward, allowing students little by little to learn
This is what makes a good dictionary for students
This will allow our children and students to learn Chinese in a high quality way.
They will gain knowledge
Our dictionaries can help them do this
Husenjan, our dictionaries are facing the challenges of the modern era
and traditional style of dictionary making is now being challenged.
Could you please describe the rise of electronic dictionaries, what are they a product of?
What kind of demand and ideas have produced them?
Electronic dictionary is the product of the development of language and computerized technology
and it’s replacing the place of dictionaries in paper style
We can change the function or produce the new type of function of the computer dictionary
dictionary according to the needs of consumers.
As we know that, the Encyclopedia Britannica was published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1771.
In 1941, the copy of this dictionary was transferred to the Chicago University of USA,
until now, the Chicago University is keeping its copyright.
However, in March,  2012, the paper copy of Encyclopedia of Britannica was stopped.
Why? Because very few people wanted to buy this big Encyclopedia from  the shelves of bookstores.
After 1080, electronic dictionaries became the mainstream of the dictionary making industry.
For this reason, Encyclopedia Britannica published its first electronic copy in March, 2012 and stopped publishing its paper copy.
Now, the development of electronic dictionaries is very fast,
no matter online dictionaries or apps designed for cell phones,
they are seeping into the our(Uyghur) dictionary realm, and such dictionaries are being produced more and more.
But we can’t say that the traditional style of dictionary making is facing a challenge,
because the foundation of electronic dictionaries is traditional dictionaries.
As to Uyghur language dictionaries, we should not be leaving our previously published dictionaries on the surface of paper
rather we have to blend our traditional paper style dictionaries with  computer technology
and develop them according to the needs of consumers in this era of modernization and information technology.
