The original Reuther Diari-German materials are held by the South Australian Museum as a set of bound notebooks. Here is a sample showing the handwriting and style of the documents.

In 1974, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS, now Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, AIATSIS) provided funding for Pastor Philipp Scherer, the first archivist of the Lutheran Church of Australia, to translate the whole of Reuther’s manuscript into English. The resulting typed document includes the Dictionary in Volumes I to IV amounting to 2,180 pages. Here is a sample (page 1885) from Scherer’s 1974 translation of the dictionary, showing part of Reuther’s volume IV pages 80-81 (compare Figure 2 above).

In 1981 a microfiche of the whole translation was published by AIAS – this is difficult to use because specialist equipment is needed to read the document. In 1989 David Nash and Jane Simpson, working at AIATSIS on the National Lexicography Project, scanned the Scherer translation of the Dictionary using a Kurzweil Discover 7320 Model 30 scanner and optical character reader and created 44 plain text digital files. Simpson proof-read the scanned files and corrected many obvious errors, however many mistakes in the Diyari remained (e.g. ] or J for j, nq for ng, ~ for uninterpreted characters), along with random representations of white space. The resulting files added to the value of the Scherer translation but were still not ideal.

In 1991 I partially edited the proof-read scanned text files in Microsoft Word to correct more errors, especially in the Diyari words, and trying to regularise the formatting.

In 2014-2015 with funding support from the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation, David Nathan processed the Word files to further clean them up and remove inconsistencies. He produced a combined XML-marked-up plain text version, with tags encoding information content, such as <gloss>…</gloss>, plus a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) which specifies how the file displays (e.g. in a web browser). Paragraphs that are indented in the translation were tagged as <tabp>…</tabp>.

From 2020 to 2023, with assistance from Edward Garrett, Peter K. Austin edited the XML file, adding tens of thousands of content tags, including coding and classifying all 14,924 notes, and 3,879 examples. Garrett refined the CSS to create a pseudo-diplomatic edition of the Dictionary which is published on https://www.diyari.org. Garrett then converted the XML to JSON and indexed the JSON dictionary using the open-source in-memory Redis database. Redis therefore serves as the back-end for this user-friendly interface to Reuther’s dictionary.

The content of entries on this dictionary website (see section 3) can be slightly different from the wording in Scherer’s typescript in the following ways:

1. errors in the English translations of entries and examples are corrected. Scherer was a native speaker of German and sometimes his translations show English grammatical mistakes, especially in the use of the articles ‘the’ and ‘a’;
2. complex translations have occasionally been divided into the basic meaning plus a Context note, e.g. Scherer’s “to be disturbed, aroused by the rain, (e.g. the grass)” becomes ‘to be disturbed by rain, to be aroused by rain’ Context: e.g. grass;
3. some of Reuther’s German translations and comments are now considered offensive or inappropriate, and we have replaced these with more current English alternatives. For example, we give ‘Aboriginal doctor’ instead of “witchdoctor”, ‘people’ instead of “folks”, and remove “heathen” or replace it with terms like ‘pre-contact’ or ‘traditional’.

Users who want to see Reuther’s original writings can explore the pseudo-diplomatic edition on www.diyari.org (in English) or the original notebooks in the South Australian Museum (in German).