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).
== [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!
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