8. Conclusions (tentative)

The grammarian need not be a native speaker of the language. For many languages, the grammarian need not even know the language, native informants are enough. However, evaluation by native speakers is necessary.

Correct and idiomatic translations are possible.

A typical development time was 2-3 person working days per language.

Google translate helps in bootstrapping grammars, but must be checked. In particular, we found it unreliable for morphologically rich languages.

Resource grammars should give some more support e.g. higher-level access to constructions like negative expressions and large-scale morphological lexica.

Acknowledgments

The Phrasebook has been built in the MOLTO project funded by the European Commission. The authors are grateful to their native speaker informants helping to bootstrap and evaluate the grammars: Richard Bubel, Grégoire Détrez, Rise Eilert, Karin Keijzer, Michał Pałka, Willard Rafnsson, Nick Smallbone.