international directory of terms

[John Renish <John_F_Renish -at- NOTES -dot- SEAGATE -dot- COM>]

George Mena has a good idea here, as others have said, but anybody who
plans on taking on such a project should be aware that the scope of the
proposal is very large. The standard English-Arabic dictionary of technical
terms is about 50 mm thick and about A4 in size, and it has relatively few
illustrations. Bruce Ashley tells us a German-English technical dictionary
has similar bulk. A general technical dictionary would therefore have to
contain something on the order of tens of thousands of terms (excluding
medical terms) times the number of languages represented. Medical
terminology is so large a set--see any English-language medical dictionary
to verify this assertion--that it would merit a separate project. In
addition, the dictionary would have to accommodate non-Latin-alphabet
languages such as Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian.

This is not to say that the project is impossible, just that it would
require enormous effort to accomplish from scratch. Getting that kind of
effort from _qualified_ volunteers is unlikely, so the project's organizers
would either have to pay dozens of salaries for a few years or get
permissions from the publishers of existing dictionaries to use their
translations. The latter strategy is obviously more viable. Publishers
being what they are, however, access to the dictionary would have to be on
a paid basis to make it attractive to them. One or more CGIs on the Web
site could make microbilling and royalty payments possible.

John_F_Renish -at- notes -dot- seagate -dot- com, San Jose, California, USA
My comments represent my personal views and not those of my employer.
"A collision at sea can ruin your entire day."
--Thucydides


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