Debian Women Dicts?

The Idea to create a dict came up in summer 2004, when we were talking in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. The participants used a lot of acronyms, which were not known by everybody. Jutta Wrage remembered creating dicts for a photographic web site and began to make dicts for Debian specific acronyms, words and phrases.

Currently there are dictionaries available in some languages including English, Spanish, Punjabi, German and others. There are three sorts of dictionaries:

DWARD
Debian Women Acronym Reference Dictionary
Debian Dicts
Bilingual dictionaries with debian specific words and phrases translated from English to other languages and vice versa
Debian Glossary
Definitions and explanations of Debian specific words and phrases - all in different languages

The dictionaries are available in two formats:

The words and phrases are linked between the dictionaries in the web pages. This allows you to lookup a word in the bilingual dictionary and jump to the definition afterwords.

Contribute to the Debian Dicts

If you want to contribute to the dicts, you may use either the submission form or send translations to jw-dict (at) witch.westfalen.de.

What to send and how it works

A good starting point are the translation files. Those files are found in the source directory within the main dict directory. For each language code the dict already knows, there are several files to be found. Here as an example the list of files for language German, language code "de".

The source files created by humans:

VARIABLES.de.txt
The Configuration for German language with some information and phrases needed by the dict creation program
debian.de.txt
The file containing the translations from English to German. One line for each translation
debian-glossary.de.txt
The file containing explanations of words and phrases in German language.

Some other files are created automatically on every program run by makdictutf8.pl:

VARIABLES.de.new.txt
This file contains all of the language specific variables, even if there is no entry in the human created configuration file. Some entries contain reasonable defaults
missing.de.txt
This is a file with missing translations. It is created out of the words found in all dictionaries. If a word or phrase is translated in one language, it goes to the files with missing translations for all other languages automatically.

To edit the files with missed translations, you may use unicode - which has to be reflected in the VARIABLES files for that language. to edit the file just add your translation at the end of a line behind the two conlons. It is not necessary, that you deliver only complete translated files. If a tranlation is included once, the dicts will get updated and the translated word is removed from the file with missed translations.

You may also send content for the VARIABLES files or create new entries for the glossary files

Sending Contributions

Contributions may be made by mail as attachment or inside the mail text. But ensure that you include something like "Debian Dict" in the subject and UTF-8 for those languages not using latin1 (like the already included Bulgarian and Punjabi dicts). My own languages are German and English. So please add some text in one of these languages in front of your contribution and tell me, if you use UTF-8.

If you want to be named as a translator, please tell me or add the entry TRANSLATOR to the variables for the dict.

Missed words, but no translation in your language known yet

If you miss a translation or an acronym, but you do not know the meaning or translation yet. You may ask for adding it. This word will go to the missing file in your language or into the acronym dict as soon as I have found another translation or the meaning.

Debian Dictionaries in Wiki

I have inserted something about the Dict in my Wiki . Text still is in German language available only, sorry for inconvenience. If you think having a Wiki to organize is a good idea and want to participate, please mail to the above address. As an alternative I could create a mailing list to organize work and for comments.

Using the dicts

Dict protocol

To use the dicts, they may either be added to the local dictd ressources or used by connecting to the dict server at la-sorciere.de port 2628.

If la-sorciere.de is added in /etc/dict.conf (or /etc/dict/dict.conf), that may not help as the servers in front of that line are asked first and la-sorciere will never be connected, if they are avalable.

So the best way seems to be be to ask the server directly by typing "dict -h la-sorciere.de" instead of "dict" or add an alias to bash profile: "alias ddict='dict -h la-sorciere.de'". This will allow you just to type "ddict IANADD", if you want to know, what that acronym stands for.

If you have a latin1 enviroment (iso-8859-1 for example), you will not be able to see the vovels from the utf-8 output of the dict server, normally. Normally this command line should help:

ddict advocate | perl -MUnicode::MapUTF8=from_utf8 -ne 'print from_utf8({ -string => $_, -charset => q(ISO-8859-1) });'

to ensure, that you do not get output of dicts with languages having no latin1 equivalent, you may ask the wanted dicts directly using the -d switch for dict program.

Web pages

Entries in the web pages are linked to other entries in the same dict or to entries or translations in other dicts.

If you look for "AM" in the German dward.de.html for example, you will see, the acronym means "Application Manager". To see, what this is in German language, you may follow the link behind "Application Manager" and see in debian.en-de.de.html, that the translation is "Bewerbungsleiter", Both - term and tranlation have an underlying link here. If you follow that behind Bewerbungsleiter, you will see the meaning of that word in German language on debian-glossary.de.html. If you follow the link behind "Application Manager", you will see an English explantation on debian-glossary.en.html.

Other links are inside the glossaries. If you look up "Member" in debian-glossary.en.html, you will see, that it is another word for Developer. If you follow the link, you will see, what a Debian Developer or Member is. These links are also in the dicts used by dict server, but I do not know, whether every client does support that, OnmiDict for OS X does

Special Thanks

Special thanks go to Georg Bauer, who helped me with collation in Perl 5.6 to get non-latin languages included and Peter Samuelson, who tried to help me with the Unicode sorting after moving to perl 5.8 when I was ready to give up getting Polish language included again. In addition I have to thank all those helping otherwise or sending translations.

Jutta Wrage, 01.11.2004

Updated 27.07.2004