Slashdot Mirror
Universal Free Dictionary
Zdenek Broz writes "The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL."
http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?
The flaw I see is that English is used as the base language. That creates a severe problem. English is not neutral. It's severely screwed up, as languages go, and is very hard to learn. There are multiple meanings of most of the words in the english language. Oh, sure, it's easy to use english, if that's the language the developers speak. But I do not think it best. Esperanto would be a good choice. Each word has basically one meaning. It has few grammar exceptions. Lots of translations into esperanto end up being more accurate than translations into other languages for multiple reasons.
But definitely, English is the opposite of a good choice.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
"Blue jeans" translated as "bluyins" into Spanish? As a native Spanish and Catalan speaker, I can only say: what a shit of a translation!.
"Blue jeans" = "vaqueros" ("pantalones vaqueros").
There are translation for some of the words, for exemple House:
* Arabic: (bayt)
* Basque: etxe
* Breton: ti m
* Catalan: casa
* Chineses:
* Czech: dm m
* Dutch: huis n
* Esperanto: domo
* Estonian: maja
* Fijian: vale
* Finnish: talo (1, 2), house (3)
* French: maison f
* Frisian: hûs n
* Galician: casa f
* German: Haus, n
* Greek: oiko, spiti (modern Greek)
* Hebrew:
* Hungarian: ház
* Indonesian: rumah
* Italian: casa
* Japanese: (, ie), (, tatemono)
* Latin: domus f
* Low Saxon: Huus n
* Malay: rumah
* Persian: (xne)
* Polish: dom m
* Portuguese: casa f
* Romanian: cas f
* Romanica: casa f, domo m
* Slovene: hisa f
* Spanish: casa f
* Russian: m
* Swedish: hus n
* Turkish: ev n
My city: Barcelona.
Glossaries like these have their uses, and I sometimes use them myself when I'm reading something and don't know a word, but good dictionaries go way beyond these. To begin with, you often can't adequately translate a word from one language with a single word from another language. It often takes at least a phrase, and sometimes there isn't any straightforwad translation and a fairly elaborate explanation is necessary. Furthermore, especially if you're going into the language you don't know well, it is often necessary to have information about the grammar of the word in order to be able to use it properly. What case does the object of a verb have to be? Which conjugation does a verb belong to?
The other major limitation of simple glossaries like these is that they don't work very well for languages with complex word-formation where the citation form is not easily obtained from the inflected forms. For instance, in English it isn't a big deal to look up a plural noun because in almost all cases you just remove s or es, so someone who reads, e.g. trapezoids doesn't need to know very much in order to guess that it is a form of trapezoid and look it up under trapezoid. However, there are languages in which words have hundreds or thousands of forms and in which it is quite difficult to figure out what to look a word up under. Creating dictionaries for such languages that can be used by inexpert users is a long-standing problem for which electronic dictionaries offer a solution, but such dictionaries won't be simple glossaries; they will be databases with morphological analyzers as front ends. I've got a paper about this problem in Athabaskan languages here.
If you go to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua and lookup "bluyin", you'll get a "No such word in the dictionary".
However, people from certain countries do use "bluyin" often (actually, most of us colombians call "blue jeans" "blue jeans", as in "me compre unos nuevos blue jeans", which should probably be written as "bluyins"). I remember reading that the Real Academia Española, the main authority was considering adding the word to the dictionary.
Similar things have happened with some words. For example, the word "cruasán" was recently added to the dictionary for the french word "croissant", very commonly used in spanish-speaking countries.
Alejo
I just noticed on that site (on the left side)that one of the phrases you can look up is "slashdot effect"