Showing posts with label on-line. Show all posts
Showing posts with label on-line. Show all posts

Sunday, April 29, 2012

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




Monday, April 23, 2012

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.