Re: What Does ???? means in Arabic

[medawar at panix dot com]

Agreed.  There is a previous work: the Encyclopedia of Computer Terms 
(English-Arabic) by Alam E. Hammad; American Global Publishing; 
ISBN: 1-881453-70-7.  

A few thoughts:

- Copyright

Since we want the dictionary to be in the public domain, we
should avoid any infringement on Hammad and other published commercial 
dictionary writer.  I suggest that we do this by multi sourcing and 
aggregating the translation and avoiding descriptive dictionary 
context.

- One to one?

We have to decide if the computer dictionary will provide one to one
mapping for deterministic translation or one to many with a prefered
choice, to make the computer dictionary serve a wider audience.
It could certainly start as one to one.

- Multilingual

We probably need to concentrate on English to Arabic as the base project
and leave other languages to Arabic (computer terms) as future extensions.

- Mechanics

It would be easiest to create a database with a web enabled front end to
allow anyone to inject translations (even from individuals outside arabeyes,
leverage the Arab speaking cyberspace).  To keep the database clean, we need 
editors to approve submitted material.  We can then issue periodical updates 
including new material and revisions for discussion and then revise or 
finalize updates after a waiting period based on feedback.

bassem