Ray Saintonge schreef:
Sabine Cretella wrote:
Referring to the posts of Ray and Gerard: my problem was and still is (but much less now) how to make e.g. multilingual ressources of my project on sourceforge.net available to wiktionary. At the moment we are talking about how to be able to pass translations of words easily from one wiktionary to the other as this part is the easiest of all. But if you had a look at the tables Polyglot uploaded to the meta site you would have seen that these tables include punctuation, synonyms, opposites, definitions, part of speech and much, much more (to me it was quite overwhelming as we translators think in glossaries and not all those particular definitions for a term).
I looked at his pdf file and found it pretty. My browser would not open the other one; I don't know what software is needed for that.
The first thing that we need to address is the purpose and philosophy of a dictionary. To me, a dictionary is primarily descriptive, and not prescriptive. The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is a model to be followed. An ideal Wiktionary article will include a series of definitions that trace the history of the word over the centuries. The etymology is important for understanding these uses. I tend to view translations as a form of synonym which happens to be in another language. They are guide lines which the wise translator will consider but will not consider binding. I would not depend on BabelFish to give me a good Italian translation of Shakespeare or a good English translation of Dante.
Hi Eclecticology,
Maybe you will feel better about my proposal for a database schema, if you know that I also consider a translation as a synonym that happens to be in a different language. They are connected through the Meanings table. If you query for words in the same language, you will get synonyms. If you query for words in a different language you will get translations. It is true that I have concentrated on the translations and other kinds of relations between words. This has always been my primary purpose for a dictionary. But there certainly is room for descriptions and the etymologies, they can easily be added as field to the WordDescriptions tables. The entire setup is also meant as a way to help translators (translation memory) or even as a base for machine translation.
The biggest advantage is that entries of how words relate to each other between languages only need to be given once. The descriptions will still need to be given and translated many times though, but it will become a lot easier to do so, because the database will know to which words they belong.
In a user interface it will be possible to select the interface language, but also and maybe more importantly, it will be possible to indicate ad-hoc or in a user profile which languages are of interest. So you could have the dictionary present itself as a descriptive dictionary. Somebody else can have it work as a translation dictionary between as many languages as they are interested in. This will result in pages that don't have to be cluttered with information that people don't use anyway and that stands in the way of what they were really trying to look up.
And of course it will become possible for people to write their own interfaces, so it becomes a translation memory. It could also become a distributed project, but we aren't there yet. So let's first discuss whether it is feasible for the WikiMedia foundation to set up a database with the necessary tables and then to create a php interface for it, with help of the community, of course.
Jo
PS: .sxd is a format that can be openede with OpenOffice.org. The content is the same as the PDF though. It is there for people who would want to edit it.