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Online Open Source dictionaries

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vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4680 days ago

602 posts - 1042 votes 
Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 1 of 8
07 September 2013 at 3:53pm | IP Logged 
Hi all,

I'm interested in hearing about the existing "open source" dictionaries for various languages. Open source is probably not the best word, but by it I mean a dictionary with a permissive license of the type Creative Commons BY-SA. Specifically, it should not have a "Non Derivative" nor "Non Commercial" clause, since any of these two makes the dictionary unusable for the first and kills all motivation to participate for the other. Due to the permissive license, this kind of dictionary would probably be a community effort, but there is no reciprocity, as some community dictionaries (like Cantodict) remain the sole property of a person/company. There are only 2 examples I know of:

-The first one is obviously the Wiktionary, which hosts translations from and to loads of languages. Its coverage varies from excellent (for pairs like French-English) to almost non-existent even for other pairs. Its license is a CC-BY-SA, and you can download a dump of the Wiktionary which you can then process to transform to whatever format you like, even though it is not very easy, due to the relative absence of structure in entries.

-The second example I know of is the Chinese->English dictionary hosted at MDBG called "CEDICT" (or sometimes "CC-CEDICT"), for which I've been an editor for the past three years. The license is here as well CC-BY-SA, and the dictionary welcomes contributions and is downloadable as a text file that is relatively easy to transform to whatever format your dictionary software requires, or even for your processing needs.

Regardless of my involvement in CEDICT, I find the initiative to be amazingly useful for all the learners of the language, and as I am now studying other languages than Mandarin, I am looking for projects of a similar nature for other languages, but to my surprise, I haven't really found any, which is why I am writing this post: if you know (possibly community-built) dictionaries that are downloadable and that have a permissive license, could you point to them here? (I could then edit this first post, for future reference).
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Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4670 days ago

1199 posts - 2192 votes 
Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

 
 Message 2 of 8
07 September 2013 at 5:22pm | IP Logged 
The Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project:
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~duc/Dict/


4 persons have voted this message useful



Michel1020
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Belgium
Joined 5019 days ago

365 posts - 559 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch

 
 Message 3 of 8
27 September 2013 at 1:16pm | IP Logged 
http://www.dicts.info/

Who does care about license ?
If the dictionary is available - use it.
Words, their meanings and translations belong to all individus who know them.

1 person has voted this message useful



vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4680 days ago

602 posts - 1042 votes 
Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 4 of 8
27 September 2013 at 2:22pm | IP Logged 
Read my first post and surely you'll understand why I'm talking about licenses...
1 person has voted this message useful



Michel1020
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Belgium
Joined 5019 days ago

365 posts - 559 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch

 
 Message 5 of 8
27 September 2013 at 8:05pm | IP Logged 
vermillon wrote:
Read my first post and surely you'll understand why I'm talking about licenses...


No I don't.
I am talking about license because I read your first post.


1 person has voted this message useful



vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4680 days ago

602 posts - 1042 votes 
Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 6 of 8
27 September 2013 at 8:33pm | IP Logged 
I'll quote myself, then:
vermillon wrote:
Specifically, it should not have a "Non Derivative" nor "Non Commercial" clause, since any of these two makes the dictionary unusable for the first and kills all motivation to participate for the other.


I'm interested in the licence because of personal values. I don't take part in community efforts if they don't guarantee at least basic rights to their contributors (i.e. the rights to do whatever they want with the result of their own efforts). I want the result of my work to be available to a large audience, and that means as well for any purpose they see fit. A restrictive licence, by definition, narrows both usage and audience.

See why Wikipedia is striving while traditional encyclopedias are dying.

Anyway, the purpose of this thread is not to discuss whether or not you care about licences, you have the values that you have after all, but about gathering dictionaries that share these common principles.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Michel1020
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Belgium
Joined 5019 days ago

365 posts - 559 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch

 
 Message 7 of 8
28 September 2013 at 12:40am | IP Logged 
http://www.dicts.info/ points to a lot of dictionaries. I don't know how many respect your license requirements.

When the license is too restrictive - why don't you ignore it ?
1 person has voted this message useful



vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4680 days ago

602 posts - 1042 votes 
Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 8 of 8
28 September 2013 at 1:07am | IP Logged 
The link gives me "You do not have a valid IP address" (on an otherwise blank page).

I honestly believe you're trolling. A lot of your posts here are just trying to convince other people that they don't need to do what they do. Licences are linked to copyright laws, and as I've mentioned in my post words like "companies", and "no restriction on redistribution/modification", the link is absolutely trivial. If you're concerned with more than just end users, then you can't ignore licences.


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