dictiona.htm: the searchers' linguistic station: translations aids and dictionaries on line

Version 2.8 (June 2005)

SLS: Seekers' Linguistic Station

The seekers' linguistic station will fill the linguistic wants of any keen, seeking-minded searcher...
I mean, not everyone understands, say, silbo, uh?

This section of searchlores represents a development of the Translation tools, now obsolete, section.

This SLS section is in fieri, duh, for this I definitely NEED your contributions.

Introduction       Language Identification Tools
Translations       Vocabularies       Dictionaries
Useful tools (Synonymical arrows & all those perky chars)
Mordred's "someinone"      HowD'YaSay: search engines
Das grosse européenne bellissimo search

Přes šteští vidění tak slepý Přes dar slyšení tak hluchý		The luck of being able to see and, notwithstanding, so blind. The joy of being able to hear and, notwithstanding, so deaf
			Ancient Seekers' lore

Introduction

There are around 7000 known languages spoken in the world. Around 2000 (given or taken coupla hundred "soi-disant" languages) have writing systems (the others are only spoken) and about 300 can be perused through on-line dictionaries. Yet only a dozen languages are really important for web-seekers: ENG, DEU, ESP, FRA, ITA, RUS, CHI, JAP, KOR, ARA, POR whereas another dozen can be useful: NEE, SWE, POL, HUN, FIN, ROM, BUL, SER(KRO), GRE, TUR and maybe Latin :-)

In order to know where-what-into what you can translate, a visit to http://www.foreignword.com/Tools/transnow.asp?p=mtfiles/f_source.htm could prove, as suggested by Stiletto, useful. Sadly these clowns do not seem to support our browser of choice: Opera :-(

Language Identification Tools

Languid: a statistical language identifier
"Languid is a statistical language identifier. Give it at least 20 characters of UTF-8 encoded text and hope for the best"

(Very useful list by Textcat author Gertjan van Noord)

System	Number of languages	Free
TextCat	69	free
SILC/Alis	28	commercial
Xerox MLTT Language Identifier	47	commercial
SUN's language identifier	12	?
Collexion	15	commercial
Stochastic Language Identifier	13	free
Another demo of TextCat, with different language models, by Beat Flepp.	11	cf. TextCat
Natural Language Identification Tool (Giguet)	4	?
Neural Network for Language Identification	4	?
Rosette Language Identifier by Basis Technology	30	commercial
IDRIS LingWhat?	?	?
Language Identification program by Ted Dunning	2	free
Lextek Language Identifier	many	commercial/free
LangWitch by Morphologic	7	commercial
Language identifier by Petamem	17	?
Python script by Damir Cavar	5	free
libtextcat	cf TextCat	free (BSD)

Translations

On line, at once, when you need to understand what you are seeking for

ALTAVISTA's BABELFISH (Systran: URLs, phrases and words, 150 words limit)
http://babel.altavista.com/tr: AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation Service (Systran)
http://world.altavista.com/: samo, other URL.
(English to Chinese -- English to French -- English to German -- English to Italian -- English to Japanese -- English to Korean -- English to Portuguese -- English to Spanish -- Chinese to English -- French to English -- French to German -- German to English -- German to French -- Italian to English -- Japanese to English -- Korean to English -- Portuguese to English -- Russian to English -- Spanish to English)

FAGAN FINDER (URLs, phrases and words, 150 words limit)

http://www.faganfinder.com/: Fagan Finder's "Translation Wizard" is a tool which connects you directly to other online translation tools. Fagan Finder itself does not contain these translation tools, each of which has different language and translation capabilities.

Very useful "international keyboard" facility.

SYSTRAN (URLs, phrases and words, 150 words limit)

http://www.systransoft.com/: systran (150 words limit)

	Web page: Enter the Web address of the page you wish to translate

	Text: Enter up to 150 words for translation

	Translate from Source: [Systran]

FREETRANSLATION (phrases and words, 1800 words max)

http://www.freetranslation.com/: Free Text Translator (has Special Characters forms)
(English to Spanish -- English to French -- English to German -- English to Italian -- English to Dutch -- English to Portuguese -- English to Norwegian -- English to Simplified Chinese -- English to Traditional Chinese -- Spanish to English -- French to English -- German to English -- Italian to English)

INTERTRAN (phrases and words, slow)

http://intertran.tranexp.com/Translate/result.shtml: Intertran ("translate in three easy steps", yet it's not very accurate):
(Albanian -- Bosnian -- Brazilian Portuguese -- Bulgarian -- Chinese -- Croatian -- Czech -- Danish -- Dutch -- English -- European Portuguese -- Finnish -- Flemish -- French -- German -- Greek -- Hindi -- Hungarian -- Icelandic -- Italian -- Japanese -- Korean -- Latin -- Norwegian -- Philipino/Tagalog -- Polish -- Rumanian/Romanian -- Russian -- Serbian -- Slovenian -- Spanish -- Swedish -- Turkish -- Ukrainian -- Vietnamese -- Welsh)
They have latin, which is great fun, but seem to believe that serbian and croatian were two different languages :)

VOILA' (URLs, phrases and words)

http://trans.voila.fr/: "Choisissez le sens de traduction":
(Français vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Français -- Français vers Allemand -- Allemand vers Français -- Français vers Espagnol -- Espagnol vers Français -- Français vers Portugais -- Portugais vers Français -- Français vers Italien -- Italien vers Français -- Français vers Neerlandais -- Neerlandais vers Français -- Anglais vers Allemand -- Allemand vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Espagnol -- Espagnol vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Portugais -- Portugais vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Italien -- Italien vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Neerlandais -- Neerlandais vers Anglais -- Anglais vers Russe -- Russe vers Anglais)

WORLDLINGO (URLs, phrases and words)

From: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, Italian.
To: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian.

EZ2FIND (URLs, phrases and (max 150) words)
Ez2find, a Meta search engine, offers Systran's transation service as well:

	Web page: Enter the Web address of the page you wish to translate

	Text: Enter up to 150 words for translation

	Translate from Source: [Systran]

Vocabularies

That elusive word...
German Arabic Polnish Japanese Russian Spanish

GERMAN TO/FROM ENG / ESP / ITA / FRA / POL (words)
Pons: http://www.vokabeltrainer.pons.de/cgi-bin/wb/wb.pl

Click to respect upper/lowercase

On the other hand, you better learn German, else you wont be able to appreciate Schopenhauer, duh.

ENGLISH TO/FROM FRENCH & SPANISH (words)
http://www.elmundo.es/diccionarios/

ENGLISH / JAPANESE / ENGLISH (words and URLs)

GOO (WWW-based JE/EJ/JJ dictionary using commercial Sanseido dictionaries)
Japan-English
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/je/
English-Japan
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ej/

EDICT
http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/cgi-bin/jedi-inon: Notredame (jp) EDICT Japanese-English Dictionary Interface (JEDI)
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_edict.html: Jim Breen's Home Page of The EDICT Project
http://kermit.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/program/webgrep/webgrepEDICT.html: webgrepEDICT system at Nagoya University
http://www.solon.org/cgi-bin/j-e/euc/nocolor/dict: Jeffrey's Japanese-English Dictionary Server (very complete)

http://dictionary.pspinc.com/: PSP's Bi-Directional English Japanese Dictionary

To look up a Japanese word, you must type in kana or kanji to find the definition. The dictionary is not designed to accept romanized Japanese input.

NIFTY
A small translator: http://www.nifty.com/globalgate/

RIKAI
An incredible translator!
http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl
Try it for instance onto http://www.shirofan.com/ See? It "massages" WWW pages and places "popup translations" from the EDICT database behind the Japanese text!

ENGLISH / RUSSIAN / ENGLISH (phrases and words)
http://www.rustran.com/: Russian/English & English/Russian vocabulary

ENGLISH / POLNISH / ENGLISH (phrases and words)
http://www.poltran.com/

ENGLISH / ARABIC / ENGLISH (URLs, phrases and words)
http://www.almisbar.com/salam_trans.html

Dictionaries

That elusive word...
English French German Japanese Italian Spanish

ENGLISH

Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Thesaurus

Example (substitute "sweet+potato" with whatever):
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=sweet+potato

Heinle

Another online dictionary, containing over 40,000 entries, based on the Newbury House Dictionary of American English: Heinle's
For instance: find

Webster (Gavi Narra's)

Another online dictionary: Gavi Narra's Objectgraph. The data comes from a freely available online dictionary (a public domain English word list dictionary, based on the public domain portion of "The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary" which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
As you type a word in the textbox, a javascript event fires and a HTTP GET request to the ASPX page. The response from the ASPX page is simply displayed in a div tag under the textbox. The page is not refreshed/reloaded for every keystroke as everything is done by the javascript in the page. There are a total of 182696 words in the database.

Just click and then type a word in the mask: http://www.objectgraph.com/dictionary/

FRENCH

"Simultaneously query Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue française (1606) and the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française 1st (1694), 5th (1798), and 6th (1835) editions"
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/dicos/

GERMAN

http://germa83.uni-trier.de/DWB/welcome.htm: DWB (Grimm's Woerterbuch) im Internet
Crap site, wont work with Opera, has been overbloated with javascript nonsense and has been "hidden" behind the entrance at http://www.dwb.uni-trier.de/index.html

JAPANESE

http://www.sanseido.net/: Sanseido Japanese Web Dictionary

ITALIAN

TLIO (Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini). In fieri, (only A-C completed as per 2003) but a VERY good italian dictionary!

http://ovipc44.csovi.fi.cnr.it/voci/002788.htm

http://ovipc44.csovi.fi.cnr.it/TLIO/ricindex.html

Here the link to the 'Garzanti' crap, that is heavily javascript intrusive and does not work with Opera, so we have tweaked the form below a little :-)
http://www.garzantilinguistica.it/digita/digita.html

http://vocabolario.biblio.cribecu.sns.it/Vocabolario/html/_s_ric_lem.html: "Vocabolario della crusca" (the italian linguistic academy), after you have searched you have to click once more on "mostra", coz they seem to love having people clicking around.

SPANISH

http://tradu.scig.uniovi.es/busca.html (Oviedo)
Example: http://diccionarios.elmundo.es/diccionarios/cgi/lee_diccionario.html?busca=buscar&diccionario=1

http://www.rae.es/ (Real Academia), more appropriately: http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm

DICCIONARIO DE LA LENGUA ESPAÑOLA. Vigésima segunda edición
Escriba la palabra que desea consultar:

Useful tools

That elusive tool... get new arrows for your quilt!

WordNet
"WordNet is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George A. Miller"

Lexical FreeNet
"This program allows you to search for relationships between words, concepts, and people. It is a combination thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, pun generator, and concept navigator. Use it to find words that fit the needs of whatever writing endeavor you've undertaken, or just to browse concept space."

Eki: Those funny characters you would not know how to reproduce...

SEARCH the new chars... Have a look at them!

What special characters are needed to write in brief

Notice the code underneath each character: for instance: Å is Å which means: "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE" (Danish)

Again (and again): language knowledge is SPADES when searching the web!

Přes šteští vidění tak slepý Přes dar slyšení tak hluchý		The luck of being able to see and, notwithstanding, so blind. The joy of being able to hear and, notwithstanding, so deaf
			Ancient Seekers' lore

Lately, many of our more industrious and investigative readers have taken it upon themselves to supply our searchlores offices with documents which purport to complete and/or further illuminate this section. We send our thanks to the readers who provided hints and material; like-minded souls are encouraged to send further discoveries and suggestions to the addresses of the responsibles of this site, that you'll find listed elsewhere.

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