Muke Tever wrote:
cookfire cookfire@softhome.net wrote:
An entry will have the 'real content' available in many languages at the same time. It will be presented to you in the language of the interface that you used if available in that language. There will also be icons to show in what other languages this etymology or comment is available as well.
That sounds like it will be a *very* crowded interface before too long.
That may be true and the only solution there is to let the user decide that he only wants to see those icons for the languages he knows.
And a button to translate it to a new language that wasn't available yet. Nothing gets provincialized.
The provincialization remains in the fact that most people don't understand several languages. So, apparently a person can see that a definition is given in French and Hebrew... but..
- Do they know whether the Hebrew definition is a translation of the French definition, vice versa, or written independently?
They don't have to. They read and compare the ones they do understand. If they find inconsistencies they can fix them. It would even be possible to mark the other definitions as 'dirty' or in need of being checked as well. Other people can search for places where this occurs for languages that they are proficient at. If you want the community of non-experts to build a dictionary you will have to give people some credit. If it's not right from the first time, you will have to accept that it will take a bit longer. But it will get right in the end. It will probably take 50 or 100 years before it reaches an acceptable level for the most common words, and even longer for uncommon words and less spoken languages. UW will help us become more efficient though. A lot less time will be wasted and this is important, it will take enough time as it is.
- Do they have any way of knowing whether the French definition has any more or less information than the Hebrew one?
Only if they click through, I guess, but that's true now as well, except now they don't even know if the French definition even exists.
- Do they know whether they are perhaps for different senses of the same word? (Did the person who added the definition in Hebrew know enough French to mark it as a translation of a French one?)
The situation is worse with balkanized Wiktionaries. In the endeavour we're in, I am not sure perfection is possible, but things certainly can be improved. If a person adds a translation that doesn't fit in one Wiktionary, it doesn't get seen by many people and it will take a very long time before anybody notices the error. If somebody comes by and copies the translations wholesale to other Wiktionaries the error moves along. Now if somebody corrects this error in the first or any of the derivatives, the correction doesn't flow through to the original or the other derivatives. In the proposed scenario of UW an error can be introduced just as well (it's the wiki way), but chances that somebody sees it and corrects it are a lot better. Besides that, once it is corrected, it is corrected for all the different interfaces to the UW at once. So everybody benefits. Translations will be done just like they are done now. One meaning of a word gets a list of possible translations in the target language. It will be possible to add a comment and of course it will be possible to click through to the proposed translations to check whether they fit.
Anyway, I think that a large proportion (say 20%) of people that have computers and internet connections are at least bilingual. Of course they can't be absolutely certain about anything they add, but that's why we have the wiki and its community to provide feedback and many eyeballs to eradicate incorrect stuff. It will be a lot easier if we are all looking at one and the same version of the content.
All the translations of the content will be found in the sameplace, instead of having to hunt across all the different languageWiktionaries.
Interwiki links do that already, and are flexible enough to handle information that isn't just a translation of prior information.
Take a look at bank in the English, the Dutch and the German dictionaries. The links are flexible, but the pages don't get updated.
It's not just about translations. Although, they too, will benefit of only having to be put in once and become available for each and every person using the Wiktionary.
This, frankly, seems impossible, except for words with very specific semantics. I would like to see how this is supposed to be done.
I'll try to give an example, but it'll take some time. Right now I need a way to include the contents of one page into another in the wiki interface. Anyway, please humour me and tell me what's wrong with the following:
- One word/term/expression has a series of meanings - Each of these meanings has a list of synonyms and translations in different languages. - The translations can be given as a list with occasionally a comment about usage, caveats, etc.
I'm going to try and make an example of a common word and what it might look like in UW.
Bank seems like a good candidate to do this with.
Or maybe [[You]]. :p
I'll have a look at it, but I wanted a spelling of a word that exists in more than one language.
Polyglot