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

Engrish Module?

[mfh]

This seems to be entirely useful. The proposed design looks like they will have a quick dictionary lookup on a word in the language being used with a definition, and cross-reference to the same word in other languages. That could be entirely useful, and anyone who enjoys Engrish might wish to help add that module (mostly for fun), but it looks like this project might actually take some of the mystery out of translation. Perhaps Engrish is going to be a thing of the past?

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).

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: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:Engrish Module?

[LetterJ]

While the show probably sucks, there's an ad running for a sitcom which has an American telling someone of Asian decent about their tattoo. He claims it says what most of those say, something about eternal love or peaceful waters. The Asian man responds and says, No. It means that in a relationship of 2 men who love each other, you are the one who plays the woman.

Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Klingon? Jive? 1337 5P34K? Pig Latin?

Re:Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if yo' ass tru-ly wanna translate sump'n into jive I suppose yo' ass could go in da house. Besides scratchin' some module 4 Pig Latin an' leet jive shouldn't be t' rock. Step off, Pharoah.

I already have a pretty good dictionary

[teiresias]

I'm all for this but dictionary.com,Babelfish, and google meet my dictionary needs.

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...

Re:I already have a pretty good dictionary

[Scrameustache]

i think the idea is to consolodate those down into one so you can use one site as apposed to three or how ever many you happen to use

For crying out loud, the man gave you 3 direct links to dictionaries! : )

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?

Re:Why start a separate project?

[dubl-u]

I think this is more like The Rosetta Project.

GPL Dictionary

[0racle]

Great! Now I can add all of my typos and misspellings to the dictionary and the slashdot spelling weenies won't be able to say anything.

Re:GPL Dictionary

[jrl87]

that's great, but you'd still have to look out for the grammar weenies because they make up their own rules so there's no way around them ...

Re:GPL Dictionary

[kfg]

The word is "wiener." -- Edwin Newman

KFG

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-invention of the wheel?

[ownermachina]

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

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: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!

why GPL?

[emkman]

Aren't there much better licenses for dictionaries than the GPL? Creative Commons comes to mind. What does the Guttenberg project use?

Re:why GPL?

[gustgr]

http://www.gutenberg.org/license

Re:why GPL?

[gustgr]

I agree with you. Though GPL can be used for any kind of work, it is best suited for works where is possible to identify a "source" and a "binary" (speaking in terms of software).

A good choice would be the GNU Free Documentation License if you ask me.

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?

Re:Current limitations

[paugq]

"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").

Re:Current limitations

[Azul]

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

phonetic transcriptions

[zobier]

Why don't more people put syllable boundary markers in their phonetic transcriptions?

The flaw

[lifebouy]

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.

Re:The flaw

[snarkh]

Esperanto - the language nobody speaks and nobody reads. What a great alternative to English!

Re:The flaw

[lifebouy]

Yeah, yeah. Of course I have heard that before. On the other hand, I also keep correspondance with people from around the world, meet with local esperantists for coffee or dinner at least weekly, read magazines and books in esperanto, and listen to esperanto radio(music and talk shows) fairly often. So the several million speakers of esperanto and I tend to disagree with you. Your opinion, while I agree with your right to have it, is uninformed.

Re:The flaw

[lifebouy]

Ok, point conceded.
That does not make English better, only more popular. In comparison, was Bush a better candidate than McCain? No(far from it!), only better funded. I try to promote Esperanto because I believe in it's purpose- to be a politically neutral language that's easy to learn which can be used for a common language for the world. Esperanto is so easy, it takes very little time to learn. It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them. English is a stomper. Don't agree? What languages have been spoken here in the U.S.? German, Spanish, French, various Native American languages, Italian, and several others. English has stomped them all into oblivion, mainly because it's so damn hard to learn, by the time you learn it as your native language, your brain is fried toward learning another. That's not just here. How many languages does the average (UK) Englishman speak? One? Hmmm, am I detecting a pattern?
Even if you could force the rest of the world to learn English, you shouldn't. It's terribly destructive to culture. Ask a non-American where the most un-cultured country in the world is. Any non-American. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The proof is in the pudding. English is bad. It's hard to learn and destructive to culture. It sounds awful. Even Klingon sounds more beautiful. And this is a native English speaker saying this.


By the way, slashdot coders, your italics code seems broken.

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.

Re:The flaw

[CRCulver]

It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them

No it doesn't. Try speaking any language besides Esperanto among Esperantists and see how quickly they complain. The hostility against learning and practising real languages in a fruitful and convenient international setting is what has driven me away from Esperanto. When I meet with, for example, Hungarian Esperantists, I would prefer to speak Hungarian with them, since I am already relatively proficient and further practise is always desirable. Esperanto should only be relied upon as a last result. But no, Esperantists insist on using only a single language, with no alternatives.

Furthermore, the idea that Esperanto is meant to "protect" minority language is a relatively recent sentiment, appearing in full force only with the Prague Manifesto of 1996. Before that Esperanto was, in the view of many, meant to supersede all national languages. Read the complete works of Zamenhof and see how often he espouses the hope that in the next several hundred years all people will have only a single language.

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.

Now

[RealProgrammer]

All your noun are belong to us!

Re:Now

[tarunthegreat2]

In Soviet Russia, the Dictionary looks up YOU!

Re:Now

[RealProgrammer]

In Korea, only old people use online dictionaries, you insensitive clod!

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.

Re:how to handle slang?

[Phidoux]

And if you have more than one car? Does it become char[n]?

Re:how to handle slang?

[shoolz]

Very interesting concept! Could it ever work for the variances in the thousands of human languages?

Funny story: My Iranian uncle (by marriage - not blood) had just immigrated to Canada, and was caught in a motor vehicle violation (running a stop sign) and repeatedly shouted at the police officer "I ate shit! I ate shit!", which is actually Persian slang for "Boy is my face red. I admit I made a mistake and I ask your forgiveness".

True story. I wish I could remember the Persian phrase right now...

(He got out of the ticket because the officer was laughing so hard)

GPL auto-corrections

[FunWithHeadlines]

"The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL."

And for a convenience, it will automatically correct your spelling as follows:

• Linux --> GNU/Linux
• Microsoft --> Micro$oft
• Bill Gates --> Convicted monopolist
• Steve Ballmer --> Monkey-boy

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.

A New Kind of Flaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot - noun
1 usually offensive : a person affected with idiocy
2 : a foolish or stupid person
3 : Luigi Dipthong, who insulted me deeply by saying that I had completely misdrawn the control unit of my favorite processor.

Translation

[Uukrul]

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

I looked election...

[Phidoux]

... and it said, "Something that happens to most Japanese men before sex"?!?!

There's more than this to a good dictionary

[belmolis]

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.

Re:There's more than this to a good dictionary

[Bill Walker]

If you'd like a good example of this, check out Whitaker's Words. It's a latin parser that does pretty much the morphological analysis you describe.

It's not perfect, principally because it doesn't have a convention to enter long vowels (the ones with a bar over them in latin), but it sure got me through High School latin.

That was back in '97 or so, and I see Mr.Whitaker is still updating the page, so maybe it's much better now. He was trying at one point to have the parsed latin translate directly into english; IIRC he was having more trouble constructing correct english than with decoding the latin.

This is great!

[tattoi.nobori]

Now, if I can just find someone to extract this stupid fish...

Question about dictionaries under GPL license

[kurisuto]

Some of the texts on the Free Dictionaries project are listed as being licensed under the GPL. Can you mingle public-domain text with GPL'ed text?

This is a matter of practical concern. I'm overseeing a project which is digitizing copyright-expired dictionaries of the early Germanic languages. Some of the texts on my site are in German, and I'd like to use the GPL'ed Free Dictionaries German-English word list to add a feature to my project which allows you to click a German word to get a translation for that word.

Question 1: Are there provisions of the GPL which would prevent the a GPL'ed dictionary from being intermingled in this matter with existing public domain texts?

Another problem. The texts in my project contain many rare German words relating to Iron Age technology which are unlikely to be in the Free Dictionaries list, so I'd like to add my own supplemental list of words.

Question 2: Can I assign my supplemental word list to the public domain, or do I have to license it under the GPL as a modification to the original word list?

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.

ideal for classrooms

[dazz_j]

I've been looking for something like this for the linux system in my wife's classroom. Not because of anything that special about the way definitions are developed, but just because it can be downloaded and used offline. (don't ask me why they can't run the network to the classroom, but the haven't). This could become one of the most popular programs there after Connect-4.

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)

In a related story...

[wasted]

...SCO sues the operators of GPL Dictionary for using words that were originally included in source code allegedly developed by SCO...

Step toward Babblefish

[Hao Wu]

Soon to be integrate with wearable PCs, then roam anywhere and have tiny headset translate what foreigners say to you. Speaker will talk back at them so they understand what you say as well!

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. :-)

wow..lord of the dictionaries

[MasterOfUniverse]

One dictionary to rule them all!

!n k0r34

[Anonymous Coward]

1337 5P34K 1s F0r 0ld p3opl3

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.

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

FAQ

[gregmckone]

Why Q Entries in FAQ use Structured Differently English.

Are maintainers FAQ also architechts Backbone of English?

Am I Possible Detecting liability project here?

Re:at last

[blowdart]

If it lists GPL as a word I'd be very concerned about the accuracy of the dictionary.

Maybe they could improve their English design?

[RedLaggedTeut]

Maybe they could improve their design by adding context to the english words, or maybe to ALL words in ANY language? For example (incorrectness possible, I'm not an arab speaker):

foundation/base(engineering,housebuilding,metaph or ical)
= al Qaeda(engineering,housebuilding,metaphorical)

the loo/the sit(colloq.,sanitary)=
al Qaeda(colloq.,sanitary)

a foundation(organisation,group)=
Al Qaeda(organisation,group)

Al Qaeda(terror,name)=
Al Qaeda(terror,name)