Japanese-English Dictionaries for Poetry

Given the importance of Kanji which are not of Chinese origin, it is striking that a large standard Japanese-English on-line dictionary lacked the English words for fish through stages of their growth, such as, 'fry' and 'fingerling'.

So, neophytes, you are forewarned : if you are interested in Japanese poetry, it is worth dipping into an English translation of a good book by a native Japanese linguist on the subject of the Kanji.

This is one more reason to be interested in the topic of web page markup for poetry in translation, as the standard pop-up translation plugins for browsers are based on those default internet dictionary resources.

One source of Kanji information in English is ... wiktionary !  Try en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金

---

When are translations transitive ?

At Tatoeba.org I find the assertion that if sentence A in language 'a' is translated into sentence B in language 'b' and then someone has translated B into sentence C in language 'c' that there is thereby a network of translation links which includes A - C.

This, is of course, the curse of Google translate, where an error in Russian - English is perpetuated as an error in Russian - German, Russian - French etc. as all pass through English as their way-station.

One symptom may be that tatoeba.org relies on ISO 639-3 language codes in which Nihon-go is 'jpn' and Castillian Spanish is not 'esp' but 'spa'.  Notably deutsch and français escape as 'deu' and 'fra' rather than 'ger' and 'fre'.

Perhaps the parlour game of rumour is out of favour.

One simple Japanese sentence

イソップ 童話 に 『 すっぱい 葡萄 』 という 話が あり ます。

is translated into English as

In Aesop's Fables is a story called "Sour Grapes".

and not

In Aesop's Fables there is a story called "Sour Grapes".

or

There is a story called "Sour Grapes" in Aesop's Fables.

My own comment to the "owner" of the translation, follows:

There is a story called "The Fox and the Grapes" in Aesop's Fables.

The story name is in quotes: but what is standard English today for the book title?

Note that we are not using the characters now designated as English start and end quote and English apostrophe ... (yes, there is a UNICODE character for 3 dots as well.)

edict and edict2 Japanese-English dictionary files

I have placed two utf-8 encoded HTML pages of edict and edict2 dictionaries at

 http://kanji.aule-browser.com/edict-utf-8.html  

 http://kanji.aule-browser.com/edict2-utf-8.html

for a reader to assess whether these two widely-used files might be more useful as multiple files.

One option is to have a separate file of the obscure and the archaic.

Multiple files which once appeared sensible - medical and electronic - are less obviously so if to be of use at Medtronic or elsewhere in high-tech medicine.

It is not true that a single CSV file is more useful than multiple - any more than that XML is more obviously useful than JSON or  yaml.

As for processing the edict2 file:  I will begin with the ICON language in either its UNICON or Object Icon variants.