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