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

Does it have support for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Klingon? Jive? 1337 5P34K? Pig Latin?

Urban Dictionary

[eln]

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

Re-invention of the wheel?

[ownermachina]

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

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: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: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: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! : )

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.