LEXIS FOR MALTED TEACHERS

The LEXIS program was initially conceived as a dictionary to help Spanish
students translate correctly to and from English, to be used together with
the Malted programs, allowing students to search for a word in either
language.

Of course, it could be adapted to include other languages as well, instead
of or in addition to Spanish, but at the beginning it was just an idea which
would work or not depending  on how many teachers and students wanted to
join in the project.

Initially, this demo file was going to be distributed among the  participants in 
the MALTED project for evaluation. If you had found it an interesting idea 
and wanted to participate, we would have thought of a way to share the work 
so that with a little effort everybody could have an accessible, flexible, free 
dictionary for their students. 

Since there were about 1000 participants in the Malted project, we could
have had a decent dictionary with the help of about half those people
by writing about five entries each, which did not seem like such hard
work.

However, when I presented the PNTIC with this idea it was not received with
much enthusiasm because they thought it would need a lot of effort to ensure
the desired level of quality, and besides there was already a project to
incorporate a dictionary into the Malted RTS. Therefore, I decided to
continue the LEXIS project on my own as a classroom activity, with the help
of my students.

After seeing the result of the Malted dictionary (little more than a  glossary,
really, with a lot of words missing and a lot more featuring only one of several
possible meanings, no examples of use and a single word to translate most
entries), I decided my Malted colleagues might still be interested to know
about LEXIS, and started thinking about the best way to distribute the 
program and the idea behind it.

Just then I came across the concept of free software (see GNU_GPL.TXT,
and I decided this looked like the ideal program to distribute as such, so
here it is.

The original goal has now changed: now I don't intend to write a professional-
quality dictionary, but a simple one that will be mostly the work of my
students, and although all contributions are welcome, I can't guarantee
I'll have the time to add them to the main dictionary. So, if someone wants to
take over the original project to write a dictionary in cooperation with some
colleagues (much as Linux is being written by programmers all over the world),
you are welcome to do so.

If you think LEXIS could be useful in some of your MALTED projects, 
here is the help you need to make it work from the RTS.

N.B.: nobody's getting a single penny out of this, so if you want to
      take part in this project be it understood that it will be out of
      kindness and goodwill, and all you'll get in return will be some
      of your students' gratitude, mine, and that of all the other
      collaborators. Authoring rights remain with the original author, 
      even if some improvements are made on either the software or 
      the dictionary. See the license at GNU_GPL.TXT for details.