Use of QaMoose

[Waseem Bakr <bakr at MIT dot EDU>]

Salam everyone,
I have just approved all the pending terms you have submitted to QaMoose. 
After browsing through some of your submissions, I'd like to make a few 
short notes (please have a quick look even if they look horribly long and 
uninviting):

1. You've done a great job! Keep up the good work, and keep adding new terms.
2. Please always be sure to fill the "Arabic term in Latin letters" field. 
Thanks to Nadim, QaMoose now supports non-UTF-8 input, but still, it would 
be a good idea to put it, if only for me to use. About half of the previous 
entries have been rejected simply because they were not in the correct 
format, and thus, the person approving them could not read them. If you 
include the term in Latin letters, you help me in such cases.
3. If you come across a term you don't now how to translate, just put it in 
the dictionary with NO translation! It's not going to be incorporated 
directly into the dictionary. When I'm looking at pending terms, I'll see 
your terms and try to come up with a translation for them.
4. I want everybody to become a Mosawi. Well, not exactly, but to a very 
good extent. First, whenever you come across a terms you're unsure of, USE 
the dictionary. It's not there just for us to fill up! If (and this is very 
likely since QaMoose is still very small) you don't find the term, add it 
to the dictionary. As I mentioned in 3, you can leave it untranslated. The 
important thing is that it is added. This way, we can maintain uniformity 
in our translations. If someone else comes across the same term and doesn't 
know how to translate it, thanks to you, they'll be able to find it in the 
dictionary.
5. Now to the "not exactly" part of being a Mosawi (he's still a great 
guy!) Don't send the words you want to ask about to the list. Just fill 
them in the dictionary, and I'll try very hard to find translations for 
them. The reason why I don't want you to send them to the list is that I 
will be doing something similar, and with both of us doing that, your 
mailboxes will explode with the huge amounts of mail you receive. Every 
time I get about 50 terms added to the dictionary (the number can be 
increased or decreased depending on your feedback), I'll send you a 
compiled list of the new words (just the English words, not the 
translations.) Have a quick look at the list of terms. Just a glance. This 
way, if you come across a strange word later while working on a file, you 
might remember that you saw it on one of my lists, and so you can search 
the QaMoose for it's translation.
6. This is a dictionary for computer terms. "Cyrillic" (from one of the 
last e-mails asking for translations) has no place in it, so you can do 
something like what Mosawi did, and ask the doc mailing list. Please don't 
try putting it in the dictionary, because I'm going to reject it, and I 
won't bother trying to translate it. All computer-related terms are 
welcome, and I'll add all of them, but I don't think "move" (as in move a 
window) needs to be included. It's so obvious! On the other hand, another 
seemingly obvious term like "resize" should be added, since it is a has a 
controversial translation. Some people use it according to it's context (if 
they see that it's meaning is to enlarge a window, they use "takbeer"), 
others use a lengthy translation, like "taghyeer hajm" and yet others use 
simply "ta7jeem" (which is what in the dictionary now.) To set a standard 
in the translation, do include such terms. What's obvious and what's not... 
I'll leave that for your judgement.
7. I will check the page of pending terms nightly, so you can be assured 
your efforts are not going to be lost.
8. I am not an expert in translating terms! Occasionally, I might get stuck 
on some of them. When I send you my lists, I'll put terms I didn't know how 
to translate in the beginning of the list and you might give ME feedback to 
how you would like me to translate them. The keyword here is ME (I'm 
self-centric, yeah.) Please don't spam the list.
9. I regret to say this: even if a term is in the dictionary, there is a 
very good chance you won't find it. What?!! Yes. Let's say you came across 
the word "preferences". You searched for it in the dictionary and got no 
matches. Maybe, "preference" is there, but your extra "s" prevented you 
from finding the word. This may seem like common sense to you. You search 
for singular words in the dictionary, not plural ones. But still, the word 
might be in the dictionary as "prefer". This calls for setting standards. I 
will deal with this issue of standardization as soon as possible. Most 
likely, I will use a system for similar to the one used in Arabic 
dictionaries, where a word is put in it's simplest form, like "prefer". In 
the description field, I will try to include all possible forms of the word 
and their translations. This will save me the trouble of entering half a 
dozen definitions in the dictionary for the same word in different forms.
10. When I see a term entered with no translation, I will e-mail the person 
who sent it with a short notification that the word has been added, since I 
will assume that they want to know the translation.
11. You needn't start shivering or sweating when you're about to add a new 
term. Nothing is official. I can assure you that history will never frown 
upon you as the person who included that silly translation of the word 
so-and-so in the greatest work of computer lexicography. All translations 
go through a selection process, and inappropriate translations are edited 
or, less frequently, rejected. So, never hesitate to add a word. I hope 
encourages you to add words whenever you can.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has contributed to the dictionary so far, 
and special thanks to Sayed Al-Mosawi, our most active contributor to 
QaMoose recently.

-Waseem