Re: English-Arabic Wordlist

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir arabeyes org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 06:12:17PM -0700, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> 
> >  1. The wordlist file might be missing relevant English terms (if so,
> >     please add whatever terms you might feel were excluded at the
> >     appropriate places within the file -- its listed alphabetically).
> >     Make sure that the english terms you're introducing are spelled
> >     correctly and are listed in a proper english dictionary somewhere.
> >     Use any good online English dictionary (http://www.m-w.com) if
> >     need be.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is such a good idea. If you want to start such work,
> please make sure you have selected a team which can be dedicated to producing
> high quality work -- managing this could prove much harder if we open the
> door to everyone who wishes to modify it.

True.  The file was added to make sure that it doesn't get lost in the
various things at hand.  Its addition to the repository ought to also
motivate more hardcore translators to jump-in and adopt it so as to 
work their magic (managing it, etc) and the file should also very much
yell at those that haven't contributed so far to __start helping__.  So
I'm leaving this file to be managed by whomever would like to really
work on it (its really not different from any of the thousands .po that
we currently have - its just much/much longer and its much less technical).

> > Lastly, its always helpful to go through the file and make whatever
> > corrections/modifications necessary -- all help would be appreciated.
>
> I'm a lot more interested in seeing this file imported to the QaMoose
> database as well as to a DICTD type dictionary. Are you going to work
> on that or is this not down your alley? 

Importing it to QaMoose would be a 10-minute job, let's wait until the
file is at 100% :-)  As for dictd (the protocol), that's something I'd
love to look into at some point (not sure if I have the time for the
next 2-3 months) - but your thinking is definitely in the right direction.
There have also been a couple of people who host multi-lingual dictionaries
that have asked if we could supply them with a wordlist and so once this
file reaches 100% we can certainly do that.

> On another note, since this is not a 'technical' dictionary, I am not sure
> the PO file format as the only format available is rather approrpriate.
> Have you given much thought to different formats and maintaining them?

As noted, since the intent here is to have the current (or new - where
are you new people ?) translators to take on the work, the .po file
(with the various users using Kbabel, etc) seemed like a logical choice.
It would also not force people to adopt to a new format, etc.  As for having
multiple formats and maintaining them, I would highly suggest against
that.  In the .po file within the header there is a one liner perl script
that could extract all the fields into an equality list - ie.

  english_term = arabic_term

So instead of having to deal with the headache of maintaining multiple
files and making sure that they mirror each other etc, it would be wise
to simply maintain one file (.po since that's what most here are used to)
and then extract whatever format is needed from the .po to satisfy whatever
needs might come-up.

Salam & I hope all are coming to the July 29 IRC evolution party !!!

 - Nadim


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