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 to help build­ing up a com­pre­hen­sive and mod­ern Zulu vo­cab­u­lary.

What is it not?

isiZulu.net is not a full text trans­la­tor, nor is it a Ba­bel­fish ca­pa­ble of trans­lat­ing any lan­guage into any other lan­guage (should be ob­vi­ous, but at times the name of the web­site seems to be some­what mis­lead­ing in this regard). So don't try to feed it with any­thing but Zulu or Eng­lish. How­ev­er, it tries to trans­late sim­ple phrases, com­pound Zulu words, numbers and dates (see usage page).

Why is it?

This dic­tio­nary started out as an idée fixe short­ly af­ter a vis­it to South Af­ri­ca in 2003 when I de­cided I wanted to learn Zu­lu. Ob­vi­ously there were no isiZulu eve­ning classes up here in Ger­many, so I bought some books from "teach your­self" and Af­ri­can Voices and Doke's bulky and dusty printed dic­tio­nary.

Soon I no­ticed there was no on­line Zulu dic­tio­nary around, only a few word lists and one or two dumb web front ends, so I de­cided to de­vel­op one of my own. It should have a real da­ta­base, some half­way clev­er look­up code meet­ing the ag­glu­ti­na­tive na­ture of isi­Zu­lu, and a fo­rum al­low­ing users to con­trib­ute en­tries. The lat­ter was an idea I bor­rowed from the LEO guys. :-)

Lazy as I am, I didn't want to make up a da­ta­base sche­ma my­self. Look­ing for some­one who had al­ready done so, I came 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, chan­nelling a few thou­sand look­ups a day through about 15,000 lines of home-grown Perl magic (no PHP in­sid­e!).

Who is it?

Just me, a few reg­u­lar ex­pres­sions, and you folks on the fo­rum of course!