CHINESE MULTILINGUAL DICTIONARY PREPARATION FOR SRI LANKAN NEEDS

Past research studies demonstrate that the Chinese language learning and teaching process is not much developed and is not a very student-friendly education process in Sri Lanka. One of the reasons is lack of teaching materials including Chinese dictionaries. This study aimed at developing a multilingual dictionary as a media to support literacy in Chinese language learning for beginners in Sri Lanka. The study used mix method to apply Design and Development Model (DD Model). In the beginning of the 21st century Chinese and local scholars begun to compose bilingual Chinese dictionaries with Sinhala and other local language options. But there are significant shortcomings in these works. DD Model is applied in this research to construct a Chinese multi-lingual dictionary. The steps were: 1. Analysis, 2. Design, 3. Development, and 4. Finalizing. The process of Analysis in this study is based on previous research. Among three types of results which carried out in Chinese speaking and non - Chinese speaking countries to formulate the number of most commonly used Chinese words or characters, the chosen concept is called one thousand most common Chinese words or characters to develop as words with multi-lingual explanations in this research. Design is done according to the traditional Chinese monolingual dictionaries. Development process basically included following these six categories: (1) Chinese word in character form (2) Picture in early Jiaguwen or/and Jinwen forms (3) Pinyin (4) Part of Speech (5) Multilingual meaning and (6) Example. Finalizing process is the completion and publication of a Chinese (Sinhala/English/Tamil) Multilingual Dictionary for Chinese language learners in Sri Lanka. Keywords: Chinese, Sinhala, English, Tamil, Multilingual, Dictionaries