Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
Sj 2.718281828@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).
== [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.
b) content between || double bars || is stored in the database, so that the two lists of translations for "minister (English, n., 2)" "minister (Dutch, n., 1)" are actually referencing the same list of database translations [marked above by a double asterisk **]
This practice will not be in the UW. Every meaning gets its own listof translations. The practices leads to many examples in the Englishwiktionary where the translation is absolutely wrong. This isparticularly true when later meanings are added.
So translation tables will not be shared across words then? That is good to hear.
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?
[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.
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.
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.
*Muke!