An Encyclopaedia and Neapolitan music

Yesterday evening I was at the hotel Domina Royal in Positano for the presentation of an Encyclopaedia. Well it was an exceptional evening, not only because of the contents of the programme.

The "Nuova Enciclopedia Illustrata della Musica Napoletana" (New Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Neapolitan Music) by Pietro Gargano. It will be great to have definitely something to verify the contents about songs we have on the Neapolitan Wikipedia and to add reference to these unique works that are not finished for now. But only having a look at the first volume, of which of course I simply had to get one :-) we will be able to check a lot of data we already have and it will help to make at least some of the data available in Neapolitan.

Such a huge corpus of text would be difficult to translate manually - it would take really loads of time and it would maybe be too expensive for quite a limited market. My thoughts here go very much in the direction of Apertium and the creation of a dictionary that allows for machine translation from Italian to Neapolitan and maybe also to English. This would help here since the terminology used is quite restricted and the whole of the corpus is work of one and the same author. So it would be easier to get high quality results and then just proofread the text. Going that way such particular works can be made available quite easily in other languages and can be offered through print on demand services.

Well: it is for now a dream ... that hopefully one day can become true.

I am still thinking on how some of the songs were presented ... it would be great to show you the whole presentation online. Who knows if the one person who recorded it with the videocamera will help to do this.

And yes, I met some very interesting people - and I had a really great evening. I would like to thank Michele Cinque from Positanonews (news in Italian and English) who invited me to this presentation.