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Jan 2010
It all started with his increasing interest in contributing articles and entries for Wikipedia Indonesia in 2006. “We have to use formal Indonesian when writing entries in the free online encyclopedia. It was then I realized mine was very limited,” Lanin said, adding that he then started opening the Indonesian dictionary more often and looking for online forums where he could learn from experts. “I was just like anyone else who had to use English a lot for work. Old friends and relatives were surprised I was making more and more efforts to use the correct Indonesian,” the man who graduated from Bandung Institute of Technology’s Chemical Engineering department recalled. Several months later, in July 2007, Lanin’s thirst for knowledge in the field led him to join the Bahtera mailing list, an online forum for more than 2,000 translators and Indonesian enthusiasts. From being a newbie in the online forum, Lanin slowly built his reputation as one of the most active advocates of the proper use of Indonesian with his blogs, Facebook status and even Twitter tweets. Err, he’d rather use the word kicauan instead of tweets. His most significant contribution is perhaps the Indonesian reference website Kateglo — an acronym for kamus (dictionary), tesaurus (thesaurus) and glosarium (glossary) — that he built in just three days after a discussion with Rommy Hardianto, an Indonesian translator working for Firefox. “It’s basically a one-stop shop for cross-referencing, because we often find a glossary containing words we’ve never heard of,” the former Wikimedia Indonesia executive director said. It was the word “evergreen” translated into malar hijau, that led him to spend one weekend last June building the Kateglo website. “I know hijau [green], but what does malar mean? I later found out it means ever. It’s this kind of cross-referencing between a glossary and dictionary I want to accommodate in the website,” he said. Along with his friends at Bahtera, Lanin plans to publish the content of Kateglo as a supplement to the more commonly used dictionary KBBI, existing English-Indonesian glossaries and Indonesian thesaurus. “We want to proof that despite having a free online service through the website, the print version can still sell,” he said. For the time being, while waiting for the project to take off, Lanin takes interest in observing the responses his friends give him when he introduces a rarely-used word in Indonesian. “They now respond with ‘hmm, where did you bump into that word’ or ‘where can I look it up’ instead of dismissing its existence,” he said anecdotally. “I realized it takes time and we just can’t force people to use Indonesian correctly in our everyday life when in fact we work and live in a world where languages increasingly borrow words from each other.” But Lanin claims he is no linguist. “I’m just an enthusiast who still uses street Indonesian when chatting with friends, and mixes English words into the conversation when I can’t find the right translation…” he wrote on his blog. bersambung/to be continued S. Febrina , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Mon, 01/25/2010 12:16 PM | People Sumber Berita: Jarod ClickMedia
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