1. A large word list of at least 10,000 to 15,000 words organized by semantic domains gathered in the Rapid-Word-Collection method. This will serve as a thesaurus for the Bible translation team.

2. After some years a published bilingual dictionary of a few thousand words that serves as spelling authority and that increases the prestige of the language within the language community. This can happen as a book, but also by using new media such as the internet or a mobile phone app.

Each language has a rich vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, but without having a large portion of these words available in a written form, translators often grope for words and come up with awkward renderings for which there would be a perfectly natural expression in the language. Dictionary products therefore provide increasing lexical depth to a Bible translation, and they also ensure that each word is always spelled according to an accepted standard. Furthermore, dictionaries provide foundational material for establishing biblical Key Terms.

Dictionaries, much more than grammars or phonologies, are the linguistic products that are most accessible even to uneducated users, showing that their language has value and is capable of transmitting important texts such as the Bible. A dictionary can therefore prepare the ground for better acceptance of Scripture in the mother tongue.

A dictionary as a booster for distributing the Huave New Testament

Andy and Cheri Black [this still needs to be checked with them] report the following about the Huave people in southern Mexico: When the NT translation was first done, the translators said that there were words in Scripture that didn't have equivalents in Huave. They therefore just used loan words from Spanish. The NT didn't sell well. Then the team focused on developing a dictionary, and in the process discovered many Huave words to express the concepts where they'd previously used Spanish borrowings. When they published the dictionary, they offered a package deal of the NT and the dictionary together, and the available supply of NTs quickly sold out. But they didn't want to just do a reprint, because now they knew better how to translate the concepts. They did a revision using the new words they had discovered. Recently, the Huave people celebrated 50 years since the NT was first completed, as there are thriving churches now who are using the revised translation.

1. Rapid-Word-Collection workshops

These workshops can happen very early in a project. A large group of people comes together for a stretch of two or three weeks and collects words according to a well-prepared questionnaire in a natural way by bundling the words in semantic domains. This approach has achieved impressive results in many languages already, with a resulting vocabulary well above 10,000 entries. Normally it takes decades to encounter and collect that many words with traditional methods. The immediate result is a thesaurus that can be used by the translation team to enrich the lexical basis of the translation.

2. Follow-up dictionary products take some years to develop, and can be done by people outside the translation team, as specialized training is needed for lexicographic work. Computer software such as FLEx significantly assists and accelarates dictionary making compared to previous times.