Version 3.9 (March 2009)  Back to classrooms Back to regional | 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. |
Translations Vocabularies Dictionaries
Etymological dictionaries
How to translate/read on the fly russian, chinese, japanese, arabic and korean
Grammatical and linguistic games
Useful tools ("Synonymical" arrows & all those perky chars)
Mordred's "someinone" HowD'YaSay: search engines
Das grosse européenne bellissimo search
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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 | ||||
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 :-(
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) |
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://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)
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:
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
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
If you use Ubuntu, have a look at the real meaning of feisty :-)
ENGLISH
http://www.etymonline.com/: ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY
Sources used by the online etymology dictionary
ENGLISH
"The Phrase Finder"
For instance: feisty
INDO-EUROPEAN
http://www.indo-european.nl/%5Cindex2.html: INDO-EUROPEAN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY
Made in Leiden, Holland
Indo-Aryan
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/soas/: A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages
Karta: "digging/hole" Karnin: "having hears" "Kaninchen" anyone? :-)
RUSSIAN
Database query to Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary: Vasmer's Russian Etymological Dictionary
Not much, but better than nothing
See the ad hoc page
 This section was superseded in 2009 by a new machine_translation essay
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Google+Och+Systran = a world of perusing possibilities :-)
http://translate.google.com/translate_s?hl=en
for instance: http://translate.google.com/translate_s?hl=en&clss=&q=ubuntu&tq=&sl=en&tl=ru, searching (translated) russian pages on Ubuntu.
for instance: http://translate.google.com/translate_s?hl=en&clss=&q=daz3d&sl=en&tl=ko, searching (translated) korean pages on daz3d.
for instance: http://translate.google.com/translate_s?hl=en&clss=&q=%22reverse+engineering%22&tq=&sl=en&tl=zh-TW, searching (translated) chinese pages on reverse engineering.
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This tool has terrific potentialities: it might even in due time "repair" the Babel tower scourge :-) From a philosophical (and rather optimistic) point of view, the fact that using it we can already now (and for sure in the short to mid-term even more and better), automatically render into english a page in arabic, korean, russian and so on should mean an OPENING of our mutual comprehension and knowledge. Also note that - through that very english - we can already now render it into all major languages, and no doubt we will soon be able to do this directly. Clearly a contact with contents produced by -say- "arabs able to speak and write in english" is quite different from a contact with contents produced by "arabs that do not necessarily know english and express themselves directly in their language". Ditto for chinese, germans, russians, you name them. You up-charge your own "synergy gear" quite a lot whenever you can zap another language's knowledge basis. What I mean is that there is QUITE a difference if you can go yourself directly to a source, and do not have to rely on somebody able to translate (snippets of) it to you. And this seems already now possible -at least in part- due to this simple, yet powerful, translation tool: Scusate se è poco I wonder if in perspective this "opening' to different worlds (nota bene in both directions: english content for non-english capable web-citizens and non-english content for "monoenglish" web-citiziens), will contribute to a better mutual understanding and increase on a planetary scale collaboration among individuals with similar interests (however odd such interests may reciprocally appear). Admittedly, in the beginning, only an infinitesimal fraction of the surfers will make use of such possibilities. But I guess that the usefulness of this will slowly trickle down: how many americans are for instance interested in mangas, and could not - until now - fully explore those korean, chinese and japanese (manga-rich) message-boards? Ditto for anything you could think of: from russian painters to arabic poetry, german history, italian art... Is this the beginning of the end for the Babel scourge? Maybe not, but one thing is sure: this could soon enlarge the web-ripples we hope to make, and at the same time the amount of knowledge we hope to learn, to&from groups whose linguistic limits have until now confined them to smaller web-subsets. |
He, this one is from Jeff0r!
Syddansk university
http://visl.sdu.dk/games_gym.html
Word-related, morphology-related and syntax-related games in various languages
Those elusive tools... c'mon seeker, get here some new arrows for your quilt!
EU-IATE
"Try weltanschauung with german as source language and english, french and whatever else you fancy as target languages"
EU-Translation and drafting aids in the European Union languages
"Links to databases and guides to style and clear writing"
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"
For instance bizarre
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!
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!
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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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