Shades of Green: Communicating Ecological Information in Indigenous Languages.

‘Green economy’ is the new buzzword in development economics and environmental protection, a convergence of concepts hitherto thought to be mutually exclusive. A corollary of the definition of sustainable development as that which meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is the necessity of making those who meet their needs from the soil and water to understand the imperative of using these resources responsibly. In other words, they need to understand and buy into the greening of the economy. This paper reports a small terminological project for translating “green” and related terms, as a contribution to the grassroots popularization of the green economy concept. The extraction of terms was done manually and concept relationships used in the analysis of source terms prior to term creation, to create morphological series and other paradigms. Fine distinctions in meaning, e.g. between near synonyms, were made.