Request for comments/Help for starting project terminologies

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:Terminology

I cannot see how else than in data base tables glossary data could be held so as to be useful for automated lookups, thus we shall need another extension (or an additional part of Extension:Translate) for their management.

Also, to make a glossary useful, we shall have to deal with grammaratical forms of words for those languages having ones. For exmple, in English, we have both "page" and "pages" which should technically share a glossary entry. In other languages, such as Finnish, we likely have a dozen, and in Turkish several dozen of such forms per word. As long as we translate from English only, this is not a huge burden, since there are not really many grammatical forms for most words, and the vast majority is following few simple rules. On the target side, at least for my work it would be feasible and useful, to have a list of all words translated via glossary with all their potential grammar forms that could appear in our contexts, which one could just click in the order needed to combine them into a translated sentence. --Purodha Blissenbach 04:08, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

04:08, 2 August 2011

Each noun in Finnish can have over 2000 different forms.

Nike20:46, 2 August 2011

Purodha, if I understand you correctly, you are suggesting expanding the use of a glossary to partially automate the translation process. I don't think that this would be worth the effort to set up, and in the case of Welsh is not practical, owing to the complexity of the rules for initial mutation. The human translator can choose a verb form or noun form in a split second. So I don't think that we should develop our glossary/terminology much further than is already planned.

However, designing an easy way to access the English definitions and the agreed translations (the root forms of nouns and verbs) during translation work would be useful. I think that is what you are discussing in your first paragraph above.

Whilst discussion is still continuing on the design of suitable software for the glossary/terminology, I will continue to contribute to the building of the English glossary in its present table form, on the assumption that all the raw material, when edited and agreed by consensus, can be converted to its final format when that has been set up.

Lloffiwr15:33, 11 August 2011

Well, yes, you are right, I was looking at supporting the translation process by some options to click instead of type, similar to what we have alerady with TM (Translation Memories)

This would be hardly helpful, when the number of possible choices becomes too big. For my work, they're usually limited to three to five for nouns, which is just easy to handle. My intention was not, to ask for so much at this time, but rather keep something in mind as a potential in the future that should not unnecessarily be sacrificed too easily.

Purodha Blissenbach16:20, 16 September 2011