Re: Humble contribution to Wordlist

[Ossama Khayat <okhayat at yahoo dot com>]

--- Ahmad Al-rasheedan <asr at baldi dot cc> wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 January 2004 22:53, Nadim Shaikli
> wrote:
> 
> > Maybe those words are simply not worth the effort
> then - I mean if you are
> > having that much difficulty with them maybe we
> should relegate them to
> > yet another lower priority list simply to make
> more progress on the easier
> > words.  Thoughts ?
> 
> Being the mortal that introduced those words to the
> project, I regret
> to say it was a bad choice and sorry for not
> investigating the worthiness
> of the words before committing time and effort. I
> vote low priority.

No sir. I've worked on about 100 words of those, and
though they are really tough that I couldn't do more
than about 50 a day (one hour or so a day), but still
I believe this what makes our 'Golden Wordlist' worth
it.
I mean, most of those words (and others we already
have) aren't in _any_ of other dictionaries. I always
say: "qamoose.arabeyes.org is something _we_ did and
it contains words that _aren't_ in _any_ of the other
Arabic dictionaries you could find!".
And YES, you're right. We should prioritize the work
depending on the needs. If we need to have easier
words translated ASAP and leave those tough ones for
later, I have no problem. But again, I think we're
going through them anyway.

> >
> > > 2) In response to Nadim question last century on
> 'define outlandish and
> > > off the wall words', it is those words that mean
> something in English but
> > > hard to explain in 3 Arabic words.
> >
> > You are free to explain them in more Arabic words,
> no ? :-)
> 
> Read the comments provided by the professional
> translator (Yasser) with 
> the starving kids :)). List of words are frustrating
> my dear friend.

No pain no gain. :)

> > Agreed.  I would suggest we do the following - by
> April 30 (that's 3
> > months) we should complete a first run through the
> 'new_words' and
> > translate what we have/can (I'm not sure what that
> means in terms of
> > how many days per file, etc and how many people). 
> Thoughts ?

I would say days per number of words, as words/file
vary and so is difficulty.

> I am willing to carry on bottom to top with a goal
> of 9-10% translated from
> each wordlist_file. The figure I provided is based
> on type of output I did on
> one of the files. The rest of the words in that file
> were not worth to think
> about them. Thats my 2c.

Again, if a words has a translation, then it's worth
it.

> > OK, I think we are to the point now where we could
> (and possible should)
> > get going in that regard 
> 
> In retrospect, I'd rather dedicate the 9-10% to
> golden files if you ask my
> opinion. This is fruitefull work compared to
> fiddling with new_words.

I was thinking, why don't you work on the multiple
translation part, while I concentrate on new words? I
think this way you'll produce more output and we can
devide the word equally on new_words as well as
existing words that need more translations. Just my
2c...

> >- ie. multiple translations.  I want to make
> > sure that we use a rather distinctive mark to
> denote a new translation.
> >
> > I suggest '::' as a delimiter.
> 
> I used ',' through out all my multiples:) It should
> be easy to replace them 
> with '::' once we decide to go over them from the
> start.

I agree on '::' as well.
 
> > So we'd have,
> >
> >  msgid  "hello"
> >  msgstr "translation-1 :: translation-2 ::
> translation-3"
> >
> > I'm open to other delimiters, but not common ones
> like commas, single
> > colon, single semi-colons, etc since those could
> be legitimately used
> > in the translation (thus --> '::').  How does that
> sound ?

This is most suitable for me.

> I just tried it. Since I don't have to Shift-Ctrl to
> type '::', I am fine with
> it. Try to lookup 'Abandon' after a server reload
> tomorrow. I changed
> the translation layout to the proposed.

Just had a look, seems like it didn't reload yet.

> >
> > In terms of the plan, could we get a bit more
> granularity for the
> > April 30th (0.7 release) deadline in terms of
> 'new_words', etc.
> >
> 
> Before the coordinator can say 'Go', he needs to
> know the head count.
> I am in as mortal, carbon based translator be it
> finish new_words
> or ditch new_words in favor of fancy golden files.

1. I don't really understand how can I say I have a
new release. I mean based on what? Number of new
words, job done, or what? Can you please enlight me on
this one.
2. Uptill the end of this week (Friday) I won't be
able to get back again to the job of working on
new_words, but ISA after that I can start again.
Maybe by that time I'll be able to estimate if April
30, 2004 is a good deadline for the next release.

regards,
Ossama Khayat

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