Two-way Dictionaries
Have you ever run across a two-way web dictionary?
Take, for example, Yahoo’s English/Spanish dictionary.
It’s that “or” bit that I’m talking about: you don’t have to tell it that you’re looking for Spanish or English, you just type and hit enter.
I think this is better for translators than the alternative, which has an extra step, as you can see in this otherwise nifty Welsh dictionary:
The Yahoo approach is better because it’s faster. In the Welsh dictionary you have to choose your target language on every search (with a fiddly dropdown list, at that).
It turns out that cases where a single word is contained in both Spanish and English (borrowings, usually) have a simple solution: just show the results from both sides.
Here’s Yahoo’s results for “corral”. The word exists in Spanish and English, so they show (clickable) results in Spanish and English:
Spanish Matches
Showing:1-6 of 6 results
- corral
- corrales
- corraliza
- corralizas
- corralón
- corralones
English Matches
Showing:1-1 of 1 results
- corral
Simple is better.
8 comments.
Technorati tags: Language and the Web, translation
LEO (http://dict.leo.org/) is a very good German/English dictionary which works like that and I love it :).
Hey Robin!
I have seen a lot of praise for dict.leo.org. I only know enough German to spell “fahvergnugen” incorrectly (see?), but just clicking around the site it seems very nice indeed.
This post on their front page caught my eye:
Am I correct in reading this to mean that dict.leo.org is now linking to definitions from the famous Real Academia Española (which is monolingual, but excellent)? I dug around a bit but wasn’t able to find an example.
Thanks for dropping by.
Fahrvergnügen is one of these funny German words in the English language, like Doppelgänger, Schadenfreude, Verfremdungseffekt, Leitmotiv :). There’s even a list on Wikipedia.
Yes, that’s correct. Here’s an example search. When you click on the “i”, there’s a link to the definition on rae.es.
Must remember that…
Thanks for the clarification on the RAE links. Incidentally, I was just talking about the RAE site with a friend last night; I like the layout there quite a bit, it’s very easy to read.
(for example)
One odd thing: they still use the ~ to indicate “the headword goes here” ( quedarse sin ~ = quedarse sin habla) — which seems to me rather atavistic, since that usage was designed to save space in printed dictionaries, and isn’t really necessary on the web.
*g* nice.
The layout is very simple and clear, I like it too. Regarding the ~, maybe they want to save bandwidth ;). That would also explain why the whole HTML code is on one line, hmm.
I agree completely. From the dictionary user’s point of view, there is usually no need to ask what language they want search in. From my experience of working on Irish-English dictionaries, whatever users type in, in 99.99% cases there are only going to be matches in a single language anyway, so why bother asking? If you insist on asking, your users will only end up frustrated because people tend to foget to choose the right language.
And for the remaining 0.01% of matches in both languages, on the two on-line dictionaries that I’ve worked on (here and here), we simply list both and give the user the option to switch between them. So in a way, language selection is moved from before-search to after-search.
Funnily enough, even inside the 0.01% of overlap, not all instances are borrowings - although that depends hugely on how similar or different the languages are and what orthographies they use. Between Irish and English, we have some funny coincidental homographs such as “fear” (means “man” in Irish), “bean” (”woman”), “dream” (”a group of people”), and several others.
Hi there Michal,
It’s an interesting question just how common the sort of coincidental “false friend” overlaps (like “fear”) that you describe are. I would imagine that they are quite common between, say, a random pair of distantly related Polynesian languages (since the syllable structures are relatively restricted, it seems like there would be lots of room for coincidence).
As for your dictionaries and blog, golly, so much interesting stuff to poke around in…
The Gaelic typeface you have on your blog was new to me — using your dictionary I was able to determine that Cló means “typeface”, so Cló Gaelach and Cló Rómhánach must mean “Gaelic” and “Roman” typefaces. Very cool — I hadn’t even realized that there was such a thing as a Gaelic script. (I know a bit of Welsh, but I’ve never run into that script in a Welsh context…) Is your transliteration system automated?
I really love the layout on the focal.ie dictionary — even the color choices are easy on the eyes.
Go raibh maith agat for the comment ;)
Glad you like my stuff! The Gaelic typeface is actually a variant of the Latin alphabet. It was used to write Irish until sometime in the 1950s but then it kind of died out, apparently because office workers didn’t want to need to have two typewriters in the office, one for English and one for Irish.
Nowadays it even has an ISO 15924 code, Latg, but you rarely see it used any more - except on my blog, that is! I thought that writing in a minority language was not minority enough, so I write it in an extinct script ;-)
The transliteration is automatic. It’s actually quite straightforward to transcribe between the two systems, a Word macro could do it.
Anyway, I’ve been reading your blog for some time and I’m glad I finally found something I could comment on. Good luck and thanks!