Trans-it
Posted on January 16, 2007
Being a fan of multiculturalism, I sometimes like to go to websites dealing with other countries. I’m also a fan of multilingualism, but my Japanese is rusty and my Russian consists of being able to sound things out, hopefully correctly. I use Ubuntu Linux at home and I knew there were some translation tools for it, but when I tried each one out they were mostly disappointing. Some (Pydict comes to mind) were written years ago and haven’t been updated since. Others seemd to be written for people who speak the other languages natively, and need help with English.
Russian isn’t so bad because I can sound it out. If it’s a loan word, I can usually guess the meaning. If all else fails, I can look the words up in the dictionary. That’s a semi-option with Japanese. Like Russian, I can try to sound it out if it is written in Hiragana or Katakana. And if it is in Hiragana and Katakana, I can also look it up in a dictionary. Even though the two writing systems are not technically alphabets, they do have a definite order, so they can be looked up in the Japanese dictionary I have. However, it’s not an option with Kanji.
Kanji is the Japanese writing system borrowed from the Chinese. Kanji literally means “Han Characters” refering to the Han Dynasty in China. Kanji and Hanzi (the Chinese writing system), consist of a system of radicals, which are mini-characters themselves. As if it weren’t bad enough that there are over 200 radicals, each Kanji or Hanzi character can have more than one. So I’ve got a lot of work to do when it comes to Kanji and/or Hanzi.
Needless to say, I’ve been looking for some nice translation software for Linux, and today I think I found it. The software is called Stardict, which confused me at first because there is an English-Chinese translation program for Linux called Stardic, which is worthless to me because I wanted a program that translates Chinese to English. Stardict is a basic GUI interface to many free downloadable dictionaries, most of which support the DICT protocol.
I had to install the software on my PC, which wasn’t a problem with Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager. I started it up after that, but quickly found out it won’t work without a dictionary in the right spot. I went to the Stardict homepage and found the dictionaries page, downloaded some dictionaries, then installed them in /usr/share/stardict/dic. I tried the program again, but came up with some more errors. After a little trial and error, I found out the dictionaries I downloaded were English to Chinese dictionaries, not Chinese to English dictionaries. I didn’t give it much thought, but there is apparently a difference. I guess only a few are bi-directional dictionaries. Once I got it fugured out, I went a bit overboard and installed dictionaries for Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean, and I think I also downloaded dictionaries for Russian and German.
One of the nice things about Stardict is the ability to enable or disable dictionaries with a checkbox in the Preferences. Since I have a lot of dictionaries installed, this is almost a necessity. If I highlight a word in English, it will show me what it means in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, and so on, even if I only want to know what it means in Japanese (for example). If I go to a Japanese website and highlight some Kanji, it will show me Japanese character means in English, but it will also show me what the Chinese character means in English also, since the two writing systems are closely related.
Anyway, the software is very nice and I highly recommend it. What I want now is a browser plugin for Firefox that will automatically translate a page into English. Google kind of has this ability, but the last time I tried it it was slow, and if you followed a link the Google translator wouldn’t follow it. It would be nice to have a browser button that a person could click on to translate a page automatically, like “Trans-it” or “Translate”. Knowing there would be a performance hit everytime a page had to be translated, it would probably be better if the user had to hit the button for each individual page rather than have it done automatically. Given time, I would wager something like this will happen.
Related posts:
- StarDict
- Fun with Japanese by マイコル・ハックス。
- Mulitlingualism is tough
- Usage of the word “fuck”
- Lingo Ringo
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
