Launching of LONGMAN-NTM-CIIL Bilingual Dictionaries – a brief report

Six bilingual dictionaries developed by the NTM in collaboration Pearson Education, India were launched on the 10th of March, 2012. The event was organized at the India International Centre, New Delhi. It was attended by the invitees like authors, academics and others who were interested including the Undersecretary (Languages), MHRD, New Delhi. Associated Editors of the dictionaries were also among those who were invited. Hon’ble Minister for Human Resource Development, Mr. Kapil Sibal was the Chief Guest on the occasion but had to cancel his program because of an urgent unscheduled meeting announced by the Prime Minister’s office.

The dictionaries were launched by Ms. Namita Gokhale, author, journalist and co-founder-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival along with Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Visva Bharati University and General Editor of the Longman-NTM-CIIL dictionary series, Prof. S. N. Barman, Director, Central Institute of Indian Language, Prof. Aditi Mukherjee, Project Director, NTM and Dr. Venkateswaran, Director, Regional Institute of English in South India (RIESI).

The dictionaries are the first publications from the NTM stable. In fact, the project had begun before the coming of NTM. Dorling Kindersley India Pvt Ltd (publishing as Pearson Education) and CIIL had agreed to develop bilingual dictionaries in 11 languages. The work started in 2006. Later when NTM was launched in the year 2008, the lexical build activities were merged with NTM. The dictionaries are modeled on the British National Corpus based hugely popular Longman Basic English Dictionary. Following are the dictionaries that were launched:

Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Hindi Dictionary
Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Bengali Dictionary
Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Kannada Dictionary
Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Oriya Dictionary
Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Malayalam Dictionary
Longman-NTM-CIIL English English Tamil Dictionary

Learner’s Multilingual Dictionary (developed by Pearson in collaboration with RIESI).

The dictionaries can be bought from popular online retailers like www.flipkart.com, www.homeshop18.com, www.pearson.vrvbookshop.com etc or book sellers across the country. Biswadip Gogoi and Winston Cruz attended the event as part of the organizing team from NTM.