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."

Comments

Re:Engrish Module?

[dancingmad]

The first entry can be "entirely useful."

I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).

Current limitations

[calibanDNS]

This sounds like an interesting prospect. However, according to the site, they seem to have a few limitations. For example:

example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word

So, I wouldn't be able to translate "blue jeans" from another langauge? This really sucks, because on of my High School spanglish teachers taught us that it translated to "bluyins" in Spanish, and I've really never trusted that...

Perhaps they should wait until they have a more robust system before making these types of announcments?

So how about combination analysis?

[sempf]

So what are you doing to find the similarities between languages? It would seem that if I searched for an Italian word, I would get the Latin root and them the related languages. This is more than a dictionary this is 65,000 years of human history, if you so allow it!

Oh, and IMNAL - I am not a linguist.

Re:So how about combination analysis?

[AhtirTano]

Obviously, since that should be IANAL

IAAL (I am a linguist). Lots of people have started using the abbreviation IMNAx as an acronym for "I'm not a x". No "A" in the contraction, so no "A" in the acronym.

how to handle slang?

[radarsat1]

it would be *very* cool if there was a decent way to handle different "levels" of each language.

For example, in quebec we use the word "char" for your car... "j'vais prenez le char ce soir", i'm going to take the car tonight.

this isn't *good* french, but it's good quebec slang. it's how people actually speak. however you wouldn't use it if you were trying to write a cover letter, but you might use it if you were writing an email to a french friend. A dictionary where you could specify "speaking" vs "writing", or even "polite" vs "friendly", some way of really characterizing the KIND of translation you want.

expressions too... sometimes expressions can be directly translated, other times you'll sound like an idiot if you just use the same phrase you would have said in english. Something that recognizes common phrases and gives corresponding expressions in another language would be incredibly useful.

I guess what I'm getting at is it's annoying when you look up a word in a translation dictionary and get like 4 or 5 choices but you have no idea what the difference between them is, or it gives you a word that actually is correct, but is so rarely used that when you say it people look at you funny.

Phrase translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually what is needed is a phrase translator (like those electronic pocket thingies you can buy ..they're great ..especially the ones that will actually say out the phrase for you) .. Rather than just translating words .. a dictionary that translates actual common sentences would add tremendous value. This is important because a dictionary doesnt tell you diddly on how to construct a meaningful sentence let alone help you understand common idioms.

Re:Phrase translation

[clsc]

And there's more to it than that. Some languages have more word states than others, eg. depending on past/present tense(s), singular/plural, and/or who you're talking to. Not to mention synonyms and words with more than one meaning depending on context.

And then there are words that shouldn't be translated - eg. in Danish, the common word for "Download" is "Download" even though it's English. You can translate "Download" of course ("Hent ned"), but nobody in Denmark use those Danish terms, so a translation wouldn't be right for that word as nobody would understand what you were talking about if you used the Danish words.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[xlv]

http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?

Before reading your post, I wasn't aware of the project. Taking one word at random, "dog", I was surprised by the number of missing entries in the links: canine, pup, dogs, domesticated are amongst the dozens of undefined entries. I don't know exactly how long you mean by a long time but it sure looks incomplete to me...

Re:The flaw or maybe not

[lifebouy]

Your funny note is very indicative. Wet Pant. If English were not my native tongue, Would this ring any chord? Would I think someone may have urinated themselves at that spot? Aside from the misspelling, how many meanings could you attach to the word pant? It's a noun, its a verb. It's what you do if you are a dog, it's what you wear while playing with that dog. It's the breath the dog exhaled. This is a standard word.
We haven't even gone into Eubonics, or the difference between the Queen's English and American English. English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar, and oddly. This is where all the exeptions come from.
Would that be two, to, or too? Would you use there or their? Most Americans can't spell "their", without their word processor. These things make a language hard. Shall I talk about am/is/are/was/were? I mean, come on. How many different ways can you bastardize "to be?" "To be, or not to be," was dead on. If English weren't your native tongue you'd be having troubles with it too.
Come to think of it, how many times this week have I heard some stupid question like, "You be goin' to tha sto(re)? Pick me up some smokes, aight?" Explain that one to a non-native. Heck, explain it to your (failing) English teacher. He/She is baffled, too.

The primary value of human languages is communication, so as long as you can speak it and communicate, this primary function is satisfied.

Again, I must point to Eubonics. I've actually had to interpret English to another English speaker! I'd say the primary function is not satisfied by English in it's current (screwed up!) state.

Unheimlich

[Magickcat]

Foreign words do not always map onto each other, so there's going to be problems with nuance. It's probably redundant in saying this, but many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.

I hope the English on the dictionary is better than the English on the homepage eg "There will be always the backbone description" and "will lead contributors to translate English words into other language." (mis)

Re:Engrish Module?

[JanneM]

It won't be a good mapping when neither of the two languages are english, though.

Take an abstract or ambiguous word in one language (that describes a lot of them); it will have multiple related translations in english. Each of them (describing something abstract or ambiguous) will have multiple related translations in the target language. Instead of getting three or four reasonable translation candidates, you end up with several dozen - or more - most of which aren't actually a good fit for the original word.

Having dictionaries for pairs of languages are far, far preferable to going through a third language.

Re:The flaw

[syrion]

Buh... what? The reason German, Spanish, Italian and French aren't spoken here--and they are, in small enclaves--is that the British, you know, won the wars and bought the land. Then America beat the British, but remained firmly a postcolonial nation. We began as Britons and thus our country uses English as its language. The death of the Native American languages is an uglier story, but has little to do with English and a lot to do with disease and campaigns of murder.

The reason so few Americans speak foreign languages is not English, either. It's because our country is huge. If every state spoke a different language, we'd learn several languages in order to communicate. All the states use English, though, so we use English. As an example, there are more bilingual people in the American Southwest and Louisiana than in the Southeast. Why? Because there are significant minority populations which speak other languages in those areas--Spanish and French, specifically.

Regarding culture... well. Popular culture is an atrocity, but don't blame that on English, either. Shakespeare wrote in English. So did Dickens, Nabokov, Faulkner, Joyce, Bradbury, Orwell, O'Connor, and so on. You could list authors forever. They've certainly done English proud, and, in fact, they usually lose something in translation.

Please--before you knock English as a language, know what you're talking about.

now write a web-servcice & client for it..

[dwipal]

what would be the best is they publish it as a web service and then people like you and me make clients to access them from applications running in the system tray.

Re:Engrish Module?

[dubl-u]

I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).

I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.

Re:Re-invention of the wheel?

[clap_hands]

I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to evaluate or criticise a wiki project even if they're not interested in fixing the problems themselves. Or look at it this way; the thread was roughly this:

Ownermachine) Why do we need this "All Free Dictionaries" project? Isn't Wiktionary good enough?
Xlv) It's incomplete.
Batkiwi) Stop whining and fix it yourself!