Gutza wrote:
Delirium wrote:
While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be incorporated within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new project. Some paper dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in them already, so this isn't completely unusual. So I'd say just go ahead and add them to Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of meta-markup on Wiktionary would be useful to categorize these sorts of things (perhaps the same sort of meta-markup being discussed for Wikipedia categories?).
-Mark
Well, Mark, I actually have a problem with markup in Wiktionary, hope this doesn't get personal. :)
I think Wiktionary is not a well-though project, I guess some guy (gal) said "let's do this" at some point, and it was done. But it's waaaay too English-centric, Wiktionary tends to become a good English-to-anything dictionary if successful in the long run, but it's a shame that it's nothing-to-English in return, due to lack of formalized markup. I personally never followed (nor even found) any discussion on the topic, but since there are a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable people involved in all of Wikimedia's projects, I expect I'm not raising a new issue here.
What I'm trying to say is that Wiktionary will probably have to go through some major (hopefully automated) markup changes in the mid-ling run in order to support arbitrary language-to-language dictionary searches, whereas "Wixpression" or whatever it would be called, if accepted as a new project at all, is not suitable for such treatment because expressions are generally not translatable 1:1, as words tend to be. Also, while "red" in English is simply translated to "rouge" in French, "bring it on" in English needs to be explained /in English/ first, and only then, optionally, in French. Therefore I think these should be two separate projects.
The last thing that Wiktionary needs is a listing of automated translation. Of course the English Wiktionary is "English-centric". What else did you expect? It is first a dictionary, and only secondly a book of translations. Still, to choose one example and say that there is a 1:1 correspondence between the words of two languages represnts a totally naïve view of language.
The idea of other language Wiktionary projects has come up repeatedly. At this stage I find "Wixpression" completely useless, or at best premature. There has always been an intent to have Wiktionaries in other languages, and once they are functional it will be a lot easier to co-ordinate them with the English project and with each other. But instead of seeing Wiktionaries in other languages, all I see is complaints. If the whiners went ahead and started Wiktionaries in the language of their choice we would all be further ahead.
Ec