Re: Dictionary to translate

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Ramanan Selvaratnam <rama@uklinux.net> writes:

>> > It must be freely usable, copiable and distributable, clearly.
>> 
>> GPL or compatible. Correct?
>

As for licensing, words and their translations cannot be licensed or
copyrighted, because they're part of common knowledge, at least in a
majority of places (they can be trademarked for use in constrained
fields, like IT, but only if they're not common words at the same
time).

> Is there anyone who has experience using common glossaries with other
> projects. 
>

I'd suggest you to take a look at Webtionary project that I'm working
on. It's written in PHP for portability (no matter how much I dislike
that "language" :), and uses MySQL for, you've guessed it, database.

Source code for it is available in Savannah's CVS, look at module
serbiangnome/webtionary. I'm planning on moving it outside Savannah
soon, but I'm not very good at spare time these days.


The features that are provided with this "webtionary" are the
following:
- anyone can register and submit a *suggestion* for translation
- anyone who is registered can vote on a specific suggestion, or
  cancel her previous vote
- you can use regular expression search
- multiple projects can mark words as "selected", when custom HTML
  code will be inserted (eg. I insert Gnome foot for translations
  used in Gnome, KDE symbol, and the birds of OOo for respective
  projects :)
- URLs are nice throughout (this is the item I specifically care
  about, eg. you search for all the "file" occurences as in
  dict.project.org/search/file, or simply dict.project.org/file if
  there's no action 'file' defined)

So, the example of usage is this:
- You add word "file" to the dictionary and mark it as "noun", add
  "file" and mark it as "verb", and add another which you mark as
  "menu item" (all these kinds of words can be customized, and "menu
  item" is there to encourage standardization of GUI look)
- You and others add several translations for each, vote for your
  picks, and wait a bit till others vote for their selections
- Then, you, as administrator of project translation, mark one or
  more suggested translations as "official" (or preffered), and it
  gets marked as such

In the near future I plan to add a list of all "official" words (per
project). I hope the code is fairly understandable, but any comments
are welcome in that regard too.

The version in CVS is in English, but I plan to extend it to use
transparent content-negotiation (as per HTTP/1.1) to support several
interface languages. If you wish to translate it already, check the
Serbian translation, and how it is used (also, if you do this and
send me the translation, I'll be forced to add this stuff quicker :).

When this is done, I may even consider offering dictionary hosting
for more than one translation project. If anyone is interested in
helping out, they're more than welcome.

Cheers,
Danilo