Translators and Wiktionary

Translators and Wiktionary

Certainly Wiktionary is one day going to be "the reference" for translators, but there's still a long way to go. In order to have a completer vision of what would be needed I asked several colleagues about what they need and don't find, what is time consuming and could be improved etc. etc.

Specific terminology

Or thematic glossaries should be included. There are many references online – sometimes you have up to 10 glossaries where to search in and none of them is complete – combining them would be great. For certain language combinations there are hardly any paper and/or online dictionaries available - this is one of the huge advantages of wiktionary: you can create it even starting with 10 words only.

Translations of proverbs and quotations

In particular in the filed of literary translation people need quotations and translations in different languages. Wikiquote does not do the job as this would mean to have many translations under each quotation in different languages.

Titles of Books and or Films

Even those are often needed when translating in particular Books - even if the translations are normally not "exact translations" but the names are needed in the different languages - it takes a lot of time to research such titles.

Too many places to search for

At this stage there are many, many websites and portals for translators around - all collect links to ressources - all repeat partly the same information - on one hand the links could be inserted in wikia and on the other: online ressouces could be included in wiktionary itself.

Searching for terminology on Wiktionary

Sometimes it is hard to find the translation of a word - e.g. someone who does not know English and searches for a German-Italian translation can only refer to the German and/or Italian wiktionary. Even if the solution is present on the English Wiktionary for this specific case it is impossible to retrieve the information. So data should be structured in a way to have it accessible for everyone. Now for sure you are wondering if there are translators who don't know English: yes and there is quite huge group of them. So: the data in one space, retrievable through interfaces in different languages.

This is what I have for now. I'll add further notes here asap.

-- SabineCretella 09:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)