Re: Arabeyes Technical Dictionary

[Mohammed Adnène Trojette <adn at diwi dot org>]

I am quoting many parts of your email for Younes, who told me he was
interested by such an initiative. Younes may also comment on this, as
he has already thought about a project like this one.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006, Youssef CHAHIBI wrote:
> 	One of the main problems of arabization is the lack of a complete technical 
> dictionary. As you may notice, our existing translation effort lacks many 
> quality norms, including grammar and spelling errors, lack of consistency 
> between the different project', no standardization of some problematic arabic 
> rules, literal translation, poor quality of style and excessive number of 
> equivalent for the same term. In short words: Everything to make the arab 
> user steer away the arab desktop.
> [...] 
> 	I think that the first thing to do is to create a unified dictionary. Unlike 
> the QAC terms (http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/), this should 
> be a detailed dictionary and glossary. It should include: The english term, 
> the arabic equivalent, definitions in Arabic and English, suggestions and 
> reasons to adopt this equivalent. It should also be divided into categories 
> (For example, Office, System, Multimedia ...) to put the word in its context 
> and to work category by category.
> 	The reasons why I propose to make it very detailled are to convince, and to 
> propose it to the ALECSO/Bureau of coordination of arabization as a 
> complement or correction to their existing dictionary 
> ( www.arabization.org.ma ) as suggested by Youcef 
> (http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/doc/2005/March/msg00040.html). I'd try to 
> contact them either directly or via the EMI (www.emi.ac.ma) as they were 
> effective participants in their project. So not only we will solve a big 
> Arabeyes issue, we will also be setting standards ???? ?????? ???????? - in oppostion 
> to Microsoft which is kind of copyrighting its glossary,- and as well, 
> proposing a physical use of this dictionary via open source arabization. We 
> might also add french to it like the ALECSO's dictionary.
> 
> 	What do you think?

Well, I am totally convinced that such a unified dictionary would be
great! But it also seems to require a great amount of work :)

Could you please provide some hints on a concrete implementation of this
project (like organisation, how to start, what to do and in which
order)? It would be great if Ossama and Nadim (and other of course)
could give their opinion and viewpoint, as QAC members and experimented
Arabeyes contributors.

How would you attract contributors to this dictionary? May it be in
some form of wiki (like wiktionary)?

-- 
adn
Mohammed Adnène Trojette