Translators are always looking for ways to get vernacular materials into people's hands. Now that the Kindle is only $114 (albeit with Buick ads) it's a reasonable option for distributing scripture and literacy materials for tribal or endangered languages. I don't suppose you'd buy one for every person in a village, but maybe one for each school, and put on it all the materials you've ever produced in that language, plus... (would you put English/French materials on it too?) Advantages: the screen is the prefect size; the battery lasts a long time; it's extremely easy to create a .pdf; it takes seconds to upload; none of the materials would go missing, they would never be ruined, the staples wouldn't rust, pages wouldn't fly out. Disadvantage: only one person can use it. What do you think? Post your comments on the blog.
Note that you can develop interactive materials for the kindle, and it also plays mp3s, but only randomly, and you have to know how to navigate the kindle to get to them.
Nuts and bolts of how to do it: since vernaculars use unusual fonts, the books need to be printed to .pdf files, which means the kindle cannot change text size, can't perform searches, won't hyperlink the table of contents, and won't look up words in the built-in dictionary. The books need to be printed to A5, or 5.5 x 8.5, to show up well, because the kindle shrinks .pdf files to fit the screen.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
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