Peter Gervai wrote:
Ec, your mails are little dissertations itself. :-)
I don't know if that's good or bad. People don't like reading long eMails, but I like to cover many possibilities. :-)
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:45:52AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:52:54AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Although some of us would like to encourage other-language Wiktionaries, so far only the English version exists. If you have somebody who likes writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)
Well, not that anyone would allocate time for that, but newbies usually create dictionary entries (in Hungarian), and would be useful to keep them instead of deleting. If a hu.wiktionary doesn't require much space or resources it would be nice, even if there would be only 46 articles a year...
All the wikis start small. :-) Once the opportunity is presented, some people will just naturally feel more comfortable working on a dictionary
[...]
The basic question is whether it could be started now, because there are already entries, and that whether there is a planned solution for the language-crisscrossing.
Of course it should. Since the software for hu:wikipedia is already in place, most of it will likely remain the same for hu:wiktionary. It would surprise me if more than 10% would need changing.
In practical terms the language-crisscrossing issues may be imposible to solve as long as Wiktionary only exists in one language. I would guessed that the second wiktionary would be in a language that is more accessible to English readers (French, German, Spanish etc.) Hungarian will be full of wonderful challenges for us; at least it uses Latin script. :-)
Like, um, let me conjure some ideas,
An article: Dog: blah [[xl:en:Dog]] (xl = cross language template insert, en = use english word as index)
Would render on english: Dog: blah
- German: Hund
- Hungarian: kutya
...
Would render on hungarian: Dog: blah
- Net: Hund
- Magyar: kutya
...
This is exactly what would happen.
where the page [[tpl:en:Dog]] would say:
- [[de:Hound]]
- [[hu:kutya]]
(and [[tpl:hu:kutya]] is just a redirect/symlink to [[tpl:en:Dog]]).
This seems to suggest a completely separate article that serves as a kind of server for the concept. My guess is that it wouldn't work, and that it probably is not needed ... but I could be wrong.
Just brainstorming.
Let's hope there is enough (en)lightening for people to see. :-)
The en:wiktionary currently show a translation for "dog" into 72 other languages. This is far more than for most words. It also gives an English meaning for the Dutch word "dog". There is a brief entry for "kutya" showing it as the Hungarian word for "dog". That entry also shows the translation of "kutya" into Dutch. I personally don't believe that the Dutch rendering should be on the "kutya" article,
To me it looks logical to have redirect [[kutya]] to [[dog]], and [[dog]] informing us that "kutya" is the hungarian equivalent.
Redirects may only be useful in an environment of very few languages, or with words that have a clear one-to-one corelation. Each language has complexities of its own. That's why I recommend that the primary task of each language Wiktionary should be to develop itself for the benefit of people who speak that language. There is a danger in being too naïve about the nature of translation. That's why machine translations can so often make us laugh, or you can tell when somebody used a dictionary too much to produce a translation.
I see three functions for the LOCAL Wiktionary:
- Provide detailed definitions of LOCAL words in LOCAL lang for
LOCAL speakers. 2. Provide translations of LOCAL words into an indefinite number of languages.
(my template thingy above helps that.)
- Provide entries for words in any foreign language for LOCAL
speakers.
(redirects help that.)
What makes redirects unusable is that a same word may be used in several languages. Hund is also used in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian but without the capital letter. Several slavic languages use "pes" (which would mean "foot" in Latin); several other languages use "can" which as a noun in English may mean a tin for storing cooked vegetables.
I changed it to LOCAL, so, yes, basically that makes sense.
OK