Pushkin Institute Research, Education and Coordination Center invites everyone to Sigma Education Building (Room 309) on June 6th at 13:00 for a celebration event on the occasion of Alexander Pushkin’s Birthday.
The program will include: reciting of poems by the great Russian poet by international students and Master’s students of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language of the Institute of Linguistics and International Communication; screening of a video shot by the volunteers of the ILIC Center for Sociocultural Adaptation; as well as presentation of the Russian-Singhalese Dictionary by a Master’s student of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Uvindu Wijeweera.
Uvindu faced with difficulties of translation while studying the Russian language, since online services first do translation of a word from Russian into English, and only then – into Singhalese. Thus the meaning’s accuracy gets lost, and literary translation becomes at all impossible. This urged Uvindu Wijeweera to develop a modern and convenient dictionary, which would help international students in studying Russian.
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For a year and a half the Master’s student has been working on a unique smartphone application. The dictionary’s interface is in English, and it includes 5 thousand Russian and 25 thousand Singhalese words constituting the basic level of Russian as a foreign language. Associate Professor of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language Yulia Kazakova helped the Master’s student to select the vocabulary. And to honour Yulia and his first Russian Language teacher back from Sri Lanka Larisa Davydova Uvindu called his dictionary ULARA.
Already now the dictionary reflects accentual standards and presents grammatical marks, and in the future Uvindu is planning on adding orthoepy (norms of pronunciation) to his dictionary, as well as expanding contextual use of words.
The dictionary features interactive functions: you can send a word to a friend, make a list of words to memorize; it also has a fascinating game making it easier for foreigners to learn new vocabulary.