Peter Gervai wrote:
Ec, your mails are little dissertations itself. :-)
I don't know if that's good or bad. People don't like reading long
eMails, but I like to cover many possibilities. :-)
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:45:52AM -0800, Ray Saintonge
wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:52:54AM -0800, Ray
Saintonge wrote:
Although some of us would like to encourage
other-language Wiktionaries,
so far only the English version exists. If you have somebody who likes
writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him
to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)
Well, not that anyone would allocate time for that, but newbies usually
create dictionary entries (in Hungarian), and would be useful to keep them
instead of deleting. If a hu.wiktionary doesn't require much space or
resources it would be nice, even if there would be only 46 articles a
year...
All the wikis start small. :-) Once the opportunity is presented, some
people will just naturally feel more comfortable working on a dictionary
[...]
The basic question is whether it could be started now, because there are
already entries, and that whether there is a planned solution for the
language-crisscrossing.
Of course it should. Since the software for hu:wikipedia is already in
place, most of it will likely remain the same for hu:wiktionary. It
would surprise me if more than 10% would need changing.
In practical terms the language-crisscrossing issues may be imposible to
solve as long as Wiktionary only exists in one language. I would
guessed that the second wiktionary would be in a language that is more
accessible to English readers (French, German, Spanish etc.) Hungarian
will be full of wonderful challenges for us; at least it uses Latin
script. :-)
Like, um, let me conjure some ideas,
An article:
Dog: blah
[[xl:en:Dog]] (xl = cross language template insert, en = use english word as
index)
Would render on english:
Dog: blah
* German: Hund
* Hungarian: kutya
...
Would render on hungarian:
Dog: blah
* Net: Hund
* Magyar: kutya
...
This is exactly what would happen.
where the page [[tpl:en:Dog]] would say:
* [[de:Hound]]
* [[hu:kutya]]
(and [[tpl:hu:kutya]] is just a redirect/symlink to [[tpl:en:Dog]]).
This seems to suggest a completely separate article that serves as a
kind of server for the concept. My guess is that it wouldn't work, and
that it probably is not needed ... but I could be wrong.
Just brainstorming.
Let's hope there is enough (en)lightening for people to see. :-)
The
en:wiktionary currently show a translation for "dog" into 72 other
languages. This is far more than for most words. It also gives an
English meaning for the Dutch word "dog". There is a brief entry for
"kutya" showing it as the Hungarian word for "dog". That entry also
shows the translation of "kutya" into Dutch. I personally don't believe
that the Dutch rendering should be on the "kutya" article,
To me it looks logical to have redirect [[kutya]] to [[dog]], and [[dog]]
informing us that "kutya" is the hungarian equivalent.
Redirects may only be useful in an environment of very few languages, or
with words that have a clear one-to-one corelation. Each language has
complexities of its own. That's why I recommend that the primary task
of each language Wiktionary should be to develop itself for the benefit
of people who speak that language. There is a danger in being too naïve
about the nature of translation. That's why machine translations can so
often make us laugh, or you can tell when somebody used a dictionary too
much to produce a translation.
I see three
functions for the LOCAL Wiktionary:
1. Provide detailed definitions of LOCAL words in LOCAL lang for
LOCAL speakers.
2. Provide translations of LOCAL words into an indefinite number
of languages.
(my template thingy above helps that.)
3. Provide entries for words in any foreign
language for LOCAL
speakers.
(redirects help that.)
What makes redirects unusable is that a same word may be used in several
languages. Hund is also used in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian but
without the capital letter. Several slavic languages use "pes" (which
would mean "foot" in Latin); several other languages use "can" which
as
a noun in English may mean a tin for storing cooked vegetables.
I changed it to LOCAL, so, yes, basically that makes
sense.
OK