--- Gerard Meijssen gerardm@myrealbox.com wrote:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:
--- Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it
wrote:
Sorry, this week is full of work and I won't have too much time to dedicate before the week end.
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.
I still think even this much is a bad idea. Copy & paste in every arena always makes it quicker and easier to make mistakes. The only time you can copy all the translations from word A in language X to word A' in language Y is when the sense and subtleties are *identical*. It will not work for "mouse" or "rat" into many languages. Just thinking about it for "moose" or "elk" is painful. Just because "mouse" in English can be translated into a/b/c/d in languages W/X/Y/Z, does not mean that "mus" in "language W" can also be translated into b/c/d in languages X/Y/Z. Every single one must be checked. Copying and pasting is the opposite of checking!
We are not talking about copy and paste; that would not be helpfull.
But further along you specifically mention cut and paste. I don't understand.
When a meaning does not have a word or phrase that is the literal translation, there is no translation in that other language. This does not mean that this meaning cannot be defined. When translations are not the same, they are not. But this is not what is at issue, at issue is opening up data to both other wiktionaries and other electronic dictionaries.
Yes of course but on Wiktionary there are two ways to do a definition: 1. Every word in the same language as the Wiktionary is defined fully as in a monolingual dictionary. 2. Every word from a foreign language is defined only by giving one or more translations or glosses into the Wiktionary language. Words which do not translate neatly into the Wiktionary language will be given a full definition (when somebody contrib- utes one) no matter what the language.
Imagine using the quick and easy way to move an article "topo" from Italian or "nezumi" from Japanese into a new Wiktionary language. Let's say the to a German Wiktionary.
In the translation section for both Italian and Japanese there will be a line with the translations into the English language. Both articles will give "mouse" and "rat".
So because we are using this new quick system, all the {{lang}} macros translated all the language names fine. Perhaps we don't speak English and everything looks fine to us because it's just what the other Wiktionary says.
So in the German Wiktionary we have just created an article named "Maus" with a translation section which says "English: mouse, rat".
The problem is that English "rat" is not a translation of German "Maus" just because they are both translations of the same Italian word "topo".
So there is not a quick way to import from the Italian Wiktionary to the German Wiktionary. The importer has to check each entry with an Italian<->German dictionary or somebody who knows both languages.
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).
Can you point to these tables please?
The discussion and papers are on Meta.
Umm in any particular place on Meta or is too obvious?
So now we have quite a good method to copy and paste quite easily translations into the different wiktionaries
Which makes me wonder why you just said "We are not talking about copy and paste; that would not be helpfull." Which is why I'm confused.
but does it make sense that a work needs to be repetead for every language again and again?
Because of examples like I've given about you can see that it is necessary.
Yes. Because every language is different. If it wasn't we'd just use Babelfish and the results would always be perfect.
When the word "applepie" gets its entry in nl:wiktionary, would it not be fair to say that the en:wiktionary content for that word is relevant? Would it not make sense to use all the content with some translations where needed?
Yes it's relevant. Yes it makes sense to use most of the content. But with the translations you must go through each of them very carefully.
<>Do we really have that much time to spend?
Whether or not we have the time to spend, a good quality dictionary requires time spent. If we choose not to spend that time we will not have a good quality dictionary. Ask any professional lexicographer. The OED, Websters, Le Grand Robert, you name it - all the big, quality dictionares took a long time. That is the nature of the game.
Yes, but contrary to Websters, OED, van Dale, we are not in the business of making money out of it. We are in the business of making open content and we can and should accept open content contributions from others. It is the aim of the wiktionary to have open content; and that is where we fail at this moment.
Absolutely! Not because we don't want to but because it's hard and we have limited support- especially of the technical kind.
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.
You will find they still do it this way. They use computers now but the work is still painstaking and precise and slow. Dictionary building is not a race.
When the en:wiktionary content were open, I would be able to re-use that content in nl:wiktionary at this stage we cannot. Am I to believe all this work is
not
relevant to nl:
But it is open and you can and should use it. You just need to go through it very carefully, deciding what will cross the languages OK, change the language of headings, change the format (unfortunately).
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 can guarantee if you avoid half the work you will double the errors.
What work are you talking about: does {{en}} not translate well between the wiktionaries ?
Yes it does. But that is the very easiest part! That only makes a small impact. It's the synonyms and related sections which will move easily between dictionaries. The translations require most of the work. The names of the languages in this section is close to none of the work.
<snip>
Andrew Dunbar.
===== http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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