Translations:Wiktionary future/95/en
Ditto what Lars and -sche have said.
- @Lars, one difference in the treatment of translations is that the English Wiktionary, for instance, links straight through to the translated term entry pages. The full treatment is available there, but not right in the "Translations" table.
- @Nox, your rewrite quite concerns me, particularly this paragraph:
To explain this, let me first take the perspective of a (reading (opposite to contributing)) user, mother language English, strongly interested in French (cross WT view). If he looks for a French word representing house, not knowing maison, he could use English WT house, take the translation reference type 2 (see image 3), cross over to the French WT by clicking on that link and get full and best information concerning maison. I’m sure, the language information concerning maison he finds there is the best one he can find in ANY other WT of WT project. After having enriched his knowledge concerning maison, why should he add this word to English WT (if he is a contributing user)? The other way round (user mother language English interested in French) it works same way.
- You assume that this hypothetical English reader is also capable of fully understanding the French Wiktionary entry at wiktionary:fr:maison. This is a seriously flawed assumption. As Lars notes, each Wiktionary represents thousands of hours of work by host-language contributors, writing in the host language.
- I am also concerned about some of your operating assumptions about applicable data models. The only commonalities in entry structure and data, across all Wiktionaries that I have seen, is the presence of the lemma term itself, and possibly lists like for translations, derived terms, and descendant terms. It is not even safe to assume common parts of speech for term categorization, as not all host languages treat parts of speech in the same way. For instance, what English grammarians think of as an "adjective" roughly maps to at least three different parts of speech in Japanese (形容詞 [keiyōshi], 形容動詞 [keiyō dōshi], and 連体詞 [rentaishi]). What Japanese grammarians of as a 語素 (goso) roughly maps to two different parts of speech in English ("prefix" or "suffix"). Meanwhile, it seems that the Russian Wiktionary forgoes such labeling entirely and instead uses running text to describe the morphology of each term. (NB: I'm not a Russian reader; this comes to me as second-hand information.)
- Since each Wiktionary describes each term using the host language, there is no guarantee at all that the labels used in the Russian Wiktionary match the labels used in the French Wiktionary match the labels used in the English Wiktionary match the labels used in the Japanese wiktionary... all for any single given term.
- I certainly wish you luck in your research. However, I think this problem is much more complicated, and much more intractable, than your description above suggests. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:59, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- @Eirikr et al.: Since I have worked quite a lot in the Russian Wiktionary (Викисловарь) I can assure that you can find that kind of labelling also there. But the reason why you don't see it when you just look at a page like this, is that you don't know where to look. I think that this illustrates very well one of the problems, if you want all Wiktionaries to function as one big Wiktionary (and if you want to be able to contribute to many Wiktionaries without starting from scratch everytime), all the unnecessary differences. There an initiative like this could make a difference.
- Lars Gardenius(diskurs) 09:14, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
- @Eirikr et al.: Since I have worked quite a lot in the Russian Wiktionary (Викисловарь) I can assure that you can find that kind of labelling also there. But the reason why you don't see it when you just look at a page like this, is that you don't know where to look. I think that this illustrates very well one of the problems, if you want all Wiktionaries to function as one big Wiktionary (and if you want to be able to contribute to many Wiktionaries without starting from scratch everytime), all the unnecessary differences. There an initiative like this could make a difference.