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

Why start a separate project?

[koreaman]

Why not just contribute to Wiktionary?
Or if they don't like the possibility of vandos, why not fork Wiktionary?

Urban Dictionary

[eln]

I think a multi-language Urban Dictionary for slang would be far more useful.

Re:Urban Dictionary

[gardyloo]

Perhaps. But the problem with slang in general, and "urban slang" especially, is that it is *so* dependent on puns, knowledge of popular (or geek) culture in one particular part of the world, and so forth. I fear that if many of these slang words/phrases are translated, unless the translators are especially good at capturing all or most of the "background" things in a given definition, the whole impact of the slang term will be totally lost. Explaining a joke usually takes the point of the joke and totally chews it up.

Somewhat like translating haikus into English. The whole 5-7-5 thing is fun and challenging, I suppose (I personally hated having to write them in middle school, mainly because it was in lieu of worthwhile reading and writing), but (supposedly; I don't know Japanese) the poems in the parent language probably have a lot of import that the translated-to language may lack.

Then again, a woman at a party once told James Thurber that she'd read a French translation of his My Life and Hard Times, adding, "You know, the book is even better in French!" To which Thurber replied, "Yes---my work tends to lose something in the original."

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[goon america]

There's also free/libre wordnet, wiktionary...

Why can't these projects work together? Seems like a lot of wheel-reinvention to me...

American Sign Language (AMSLAN?)

[buckhead_buddy]

Just today I was trying to prototype some ideas on a dictionary idea I had.

My idea was to create a tutorial for learning AMSLAN (American Sign Language) and to use texts from Project Gutenburg or other public domain works. One (of several) problems though is that English is rife with homographs... words that are spelled alike but have different meanings. In the case of sign language, a sign for a bow in a little girl's hair might appear extremely odd if the sign for bow of a ship popped up in automatic substitution.

Dealing with the homographs is a problem, but I see that this site's plan already takes a stab at dealing with such things (in their cat example). I'd love it if they went to the trouble of also including a bit of AMSLAN (either in animations or static pictures) as that might inspire me with some help in the solution.

Ideally, my desire is to get an automated library that could read a text (possibly read by the human sorting the homographs). And allow a user to listen to the reading and watch the text (while learning English), listen to the reading only (if hearing impaired), watch a silent sign language presentation with subtitles (to learn sign language), or watch a silent presentation through signing (if reading in silence is preferable).

Just kind of bizarre that the idea struck the same day as this article appeared, I thought. :-)

Dictionary != language textbook

[glasse]

Having taken Chinese I this term, I have learned that there's a whole lot more to a language than just vocabulary. In order to be a useful English-killer or monolinguism-killer, a language site needs to have information on how to pronounce words, how to write all of the glyphs used in the language (which might not be important if it uses a Latin-based script and so does your native language, but a lot of languages don't), and some idea of how to construct a useful sentence. (Word order, how to conjugate verbs/decline nouns, use of measure words/particles/prepositions, even synonyms and homonyms..) Also useful would be free media in the language -- TV shows, music, menus, newspapers -- but I know this would be very difficult to host effectively. My Chinese textbook's name translates as "Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing". Developing skill with all of these facets of a language is part of gaining facility with it.

I would love a free-content languages database, full of audio samples of native speakers and grammar rules, but this isn't quite there yet. I do hope something like it gets off the ground, though, because monolinguism is a terrible disease in a global community :).

Ethan