Muke Tever wrote:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[Interlingua]: ministro; [Japanese]: 大臣
(だいじん,
daijin);
Will users of non-Roman scripts be able to see transliterations in
their own scripts, or will they have to be stuck with Roman?
When you look at the current practice in the nl:wiktionary, you will
find that the different scripts are supported. This will also be the
case for Ultimate Wiktionary. More interesting is how a right to left
implementation will look like, like Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew ..
No, I know the scripts are supported. I meant, in the translation list,
if the transliteration such as "daijin" would be transliterated (or
transliteratable) into the user's script as well. I know that nl:wikt
doesn't give a Hebrew transliteration of "大臣" anywhere, and that
en:wikt
has actually been deleting Cyrillic transliterations of Chinese (though
those were added as entries, not translations).
Whatever my complaints about Gerard's UW, scripts are not one of them.
== [Dutch] ==
minister ([n.]) 1. [A person commissioned by the government for
public service.]
"Zware voet jaagt minister Anciaux uit de bocht."
Hopefully there's space for a translation of this example
in the user's language.
There will be room for idiom, this line is problematic in that the
meaning of "zware voet" is not clear in its own right without context.
So as idiom it is not really great.
I think that's meant to be a sample sentence using the word, not
necessarily an idiom. But it should bear a translation into the
user's language as well.
We haven't really addressed this issue at en:wiktionary. My first
impression would be that a quotation to illustrate the use of a word in
a foreign language should be in its original, _and_ should be
accompanied by its English translation.
What exactly is the translation table attaching to?
The definition
number? The auto-translating definition? or the individual language's
translation of the definition? If the English definition is improved
by someone, made more specific (and hopefully it would be) nothing
stops a Dutch editor from adding translations (in several languages
even) that relate only to the older definition that was faithfully
done into his language. Also, the English editor mightn't even think
to check an added translation--does he know that the Dutch editor isn't
translating from the same definition?
Meaning exist on a global level. When a meaning is added, it will be
universally seen to be there. Meanings are linked to a word.
Translations will be linked to meanings.
So the problem of translations given to a language's out-of-date version
of a meaning will still exist?
"Meaning on a global level" would need to be in some kind of
abstraction. Without that you would need to give precedence to some
language.
[1] There is a
difficult question, which we are ignoring for now :
just how precisely do all the translations of "minster (English, n.,
2)" have synonymous definitions? When are two different words ever
truly synonymous? But that is a discussion for another month.
Even when
words are not "truly" synonymous for some, they may be "truly"
synonymous for others. Some words have only a distinct meaning in
certain subcultures. This can be adressed by giving a word multiple
meanings. The truly synonymous meaning and the slightly differing
meaning.
If a word really has different meanings, that's not a problem, and should
be being done anyway.
How different is different? "Number" and "numeral" have closely
related, but different meanings that are not recognized by everyone.
The differential will not always be the same in all languages.
But this doesn't work if the word doesn't
actually *have* multiple
meanings
to native speakers. English "you" isn't divided into formal and
familiar,
or masculine and feminine, as it is in some languages. I hope this isn't
what you're talking about.
The 2nd person pronoun is full of problems. The English singular,
"thou", is rarely used, so using that in translation would sound very
strange to most hearers. In French politeness and social standing play
a major role in the choice of singular and plural. Spanish takes
politeness one step further by also using "usted", which takes a third
person verb. New and old world versions of the language will treat
these issues differently. You can't possibly sort this out through a
multi-language translating dictionary.
A minister is a special case. Nouns that refer to
specific referents
are likely to have synonymous definitions, but they're relatively
rare; most words won't have ready one-word translations so easily. Try:
walk, run, saunter, dash, sashay, hurry, skip, mosey, gallop (varying
degrees of the same kind of action); die, expire, pass away, kick the
bucket, buy the farm (varying degrees of the formality of an
action);...
sludge, slush, slime, mush, slurry... (various specific referents in
the
same close semantic field) -- different languages will handle them all
differently (though possibly the common European languages will share
more gracefully than others).
When it comes to explain what words like walk, run, saunter, dash,
sashay, hurry, skip, mosey, gallop mean, it helps when you use
methodology used in thesauri: some terms are included in others some may
be specific to certain animals.
Yes, they all have different meanings. They have different pragmatics
too. For example it may be that the usual translation in one language
actually has a different literal meaning, and that the exact translation
is a kind of technical term nobody would use, or may not exist at all.
(A well-documented example is that of color terms.) But if, as I
understand from what you say above, translation tables are not being
shared across words with "synonymous" definitions, then my previous
comment on this point doesn't apply.
It's the subtleties that make the difference. Albert Camus' novel
"L'Étranger" is variously tianslated as "The Stranger" or
"The
Outsider". It takes more than crude dictionary knowledge to sort out
the distinction.
Before a UW project or any other kind of multilanguage translating
dictionary can be an effective tool the material belonging to the
separate component languages must first be functional reference tools
for the native speakers of each language. English already has over
75,000 entries, but it still has a long way to go before it can be that
kind of tool for English speakers. I can't imagine that the much
smaller wiktionaries for other languages are any closer.
Ec