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Reliability of Wiktionary database | ||
Tags: Dictionaries | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Syntax Bilingual Hexaglot Newbie South Africa Joined 5094 days ago 28 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 7 24 September 2015 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi guys
I'm currently a third year engineering student, so I don't have much time for studying my foreign languages. However, I taught myself computer programming a while back and have been considering writing some sort of program to facilitate my language learning. I will, however, need some sort of dictionary database. The Wiktionary databases are available for download. At the moment I'm mostly interested in the French-English, Russian-English and German-English databases (in that order). Can I trust Wiktionary's translations? How do they compare to other dictionaries? I don't necessarily need extremely in-depth discussions of each word, but rather accurate translations. Do you know of any other free databases I might be able to use? If I can get the program to work, I'll probably end up expanding it to include new languages I may learn in the future. Are some of the dictionaries in Wiktionary less reliable than others? All comments welcome Thanks, Henk 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 7 25 September 2015 at 2:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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I use wiktionary a lot and both Russian and German dictionaries are pretty good. Some words are missing but I don't remember seeing any actually incorrect translations.
Be sure to look at existing projects like Learning With Texts. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Syntax Bilingual Hexaglot Newbie South Africa Joined 5094 days ago 28 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 7 25 September 2015 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the heads-up on Learning with Texts. It looks really cool, but doesn't quite
do what I had in mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4637 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 4 of 7 25 September 2015 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The translations I've seen on wiktionary have been very good. I don't use it much though, because there's no way to search a specific language. Having to
scroll through the results page to find the language I want sends me batty. But the pages are fairly standardized I think so there's no reason you shouldn't be able to grab a dump and crawl through it to make some nice dual language versions. Spanish has the fantastic Spanishdict.com, but German has nothing decent available in terms of dual language online dictionaries as far as I know. Edited by AlexTG on 25 September 2015 at 4:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alphathon Groupie Scotland Joined 4179 days ago 60 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Scottish Gaelic | Message 5 of 7 26 September 2015 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually you can. Simply add # then the language name (in English) on the end of the search term. For example, typing in#German will take you directly to the German word in. If there isn't an entry for the language you typed you'll just end up at the top of the page.
That depends on what you mean by decent. Pons.com and collinsdictionary.com are pretty good (both of which are available in multiple languages including German). Neither give example sentences usually, so if that's what you need then sure. Edited by Alphathon on 26 September 2015 at 3:45pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4637 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 7 26 September 2015 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Awesome! I didn't know about the pons dictionary, looks good, can't stand the collins interface. Wiktionary still
isn't ideal for German because you have to remember to use a capital letter for nouns, but now that I know about the # technique I'm gonna be using it a lot more for all my languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4520 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 7 of 7 26 September 2015 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Consider the localized Wiktionary versions for those. So you would look up "Haus" on the German Wiktionary (de.wiktionary.org) and then use the translation box to get the English translation. Look here: https://dkpro.github.io/dkpro-jwktl/ and here: https://github.com/componavt/wikokit This way you get pretty accurate one-word translations. The problem with Wiktionary in general is coverage. For some languages there are more words listed than for others. In case you don't need offline use, you can also look into the Glosbe API: https://glosbe.com/a-api Glosbe combines several online sources, it's a superset of Wiktionary. dict.cc lets you download their dictionary files, but I don't know how well they work. Their best supported language pair seems to be English-German. Edited by daegga on 26 September 2015 at 9:49pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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