Dinky-di Dinka Dictionary Wins Small Business Award

21.11.06

A book which teaches children English in Dinka, one of the newest languages found in Australia , has won for its publishers a prestigious Small Business Award in the annual National Multicultural Marketing Awards. The winners were announced tonight by the Premier, Morris Iemma at a gala dinner in Sydney .

The English Dinka Picture Dictionary is believed to be the first book in Dinka every published in Australia and the first of its kind in the world.

The Multicultural Marketing Awards have been run by the Community Relations Commission For a multicultural NSW since 1989.

Congratulating Global Language Books for their award, the Chair of the Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian , said: “This picture dictionary is another excellent contribution to the harmonious settlement of some of the most unfortunate people ever accepted by Australia as refugees. It is also a useful tool for people who are living around the Sudanese refugees, their school friends and teachers and government and community workers.

“The publishers have done one of those things we first envisaged when we set up these awards – they saw a need in the community, they devised an innovative way to meet that need and they carried out the task successfully, using the cultural and linguistic resources within our society. That is multicultural marketing in a nutshell!”, he said.

In her written submission for the Small Business Award, the publisher Theresa Ramage said: “It’s all about integration and that’s the reason we did this book. It’s a way of joining people together”. She explained that she saw the need for a Dinka dictionary for the local Sudanese community and went about finding someone who could speak, read and write Dinka - a language banned since the Civil war in the 1950’s. She found a local schoolteacher Makur Dhuor from Evans High school in Blacktown who had been a journalist in Sudan to do the translations.

Global Language Books is the distributer and agent for many publishers around the world for children's books in community languages. They had already published picture dictionaries in 18 bi-lingual editions from Albanian to Urdu and including Somali, Bengali and Kurdish. Other books for children have been published in over 50 different languages.

The Dinka Dictionary is being sold nationally in Australia and throughout the world where Dinka speakers have settled. It has even found its way back to Sudan. A copy was found in was discovered in southern Sudan and mentioned in a Reuters Newsagency despatch from a Sudanese village.