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.
So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste quite easily translations into the different wiktionaries, but does it make sense that a work needs to be repetead for every language again and again? Do we really have that much time to spend? Up to some weeks it was not even possible to think about a copy and paste method and thanks Gerard it is there - so its one huge step ahead, but it is still far away from being "time friendly". Users (contributing users) should talk about concentrating efforts in order to have better results in less time. Now we are using the wiktionary just like the huge dictionary editors used to do years ago when every single word with all the relevant information was written on single sheets. The techinques are there to avoid double or in case of language translatios multiple work (how many wiktionaries are there? 20? 30? I did not check this out) so instead of one person needing one hour for a certain work this menas 30 hours of work to do the same job for 30 witkonaries. I agree, wiktionary is open content, but contributing people are working - and 30 hours are almost a week of work ... how much does this cost? where's the break even point for hours invested for programming and hours invested to let's say only 5000 terms? We are talking about computers and software of the second millennium not about the good old Zuse.
A volunteer project does not usually need to think in terms of financial break even points. Nobody is getting paid. :-) Better results depend on what you mean by that term.
Please don't become upset now: but we should try to make things with a certain criteria from the beginning on - it is much harder to do it afterwards when there's a lot of data inserted and the need is definitely there. To my experience wiktionary is going to be used by at least 90% of the people like a dictionary - to search a word in a certain language.
We "have" been working on criteria from the beginning! You're right that most people will use Wiktionary to look up a word. That's what it's for.
E.g. what disturbes a bit is that foreign language words are "seen" in the wiktionary. This is confusing. German should only give German terminology in its lists, English the English one, Dutch the Dutch one etc. When I am on the English wiktionary and find "Deutsch" as a single page this is not logic to me - the term "Deutsch" should be linked to the German wiktionary instead and should not appear in the listing under the letter "D".
This was intentional. English speakers will gain an insight into the words of other languages.
All of what you ask for is needed, but there are already plenty of glossaries that could be uploaded and I am sure, if we have the techniques many companies would agree to pass their glossaries with definitions to OpenContent.
So what? We're not looking for mere glossaries.
The next thing is: I now can pass e.g. the colours list to Wiktonary, but I cannot retrieve an animals list with all its translations - so it's a one-way direction - to work with many other projects both directions are needed. So many of us who now concentrate on their own projects probably would say: I pass all my data to wiktionary as I get something back. Many of these listings, definitions etc. are from people in the language industry - and people of the language industry most of all search for the right term.
I have not followed the issue of colours or animals, so I can't comment fully, though it would seem that for the latter the best thing would be to relate the vernacular names to the Latin binomials. The fact that a term comes from the "language industry" should not make the proposals of others less valid. Contributions from either source are open to discussion and modification.
So: in any case I support the XML and database way - it will take some time to develop it, but once it is there wiktionary has all the characteristics needed to become the main reference tool for people working with languages and people being interested in languages. The more people can use it the more will contribute. Gerard, Polyglot and whoever is convinced about this way: please don't stop going. You are on the right way.
We will be more able to discuss the proposal when we see what it looks like.
Now who's going to kill me ;-) ??
Huh! :-* No problem. Va bene.
Ec