Dear Linguists,

We’d like your help with a conceptual mapping/translation task.

We are child language researchers at Stanford and have created a website called Wordbank, which archives parent reports of children’s vocabulary from around the world. We use forms called CDIs (Communicative Development Inventories). These forms have been adapted by local researchers for dozens of languages.

In order to look at similarities and differences in language learning across languages, we are trying to get good translations of CDI word lists into the same set of "universal" concepts. We know this is a hard task that is itself an important and tricky research program (and we’re aware of efforts like Natural Semantics Metalanguage), but we’re trying to do our best.

We’re recruiting linguists who are also proficient or native speakers of a set of languages to check and correct our lists of children's early learned words (so experience with kids is a plus!). We have a (tentative) list of concepts, and your task is to go through and check the matches of words to these concepts. (We have some guidelines for how to resolve tricky cases, of which there are quite a few!)

So, why do we need you? We would like to find native/highly-proficient speakers of each language in our list. If you'd like to help us, please fill out the survey below. If you are selected, we'll give you an Amazon gift card for your time: some languages need more help than others, so we will compensate you for 1-2 hours ($25-50) depending on the amount of work needed. We greatly appreciate your help and expertise!  (Please feel free to pass on this survey to anyone else who might be interested!)