Re: international directory of terms

[Mike Starr <mike -dot- starr -at- PLATINUM -dot- COM>]

Interesting you should say that, John. I was just listening to a local public
radio station yesterday morning and the guest being interviewed was the author
of a book called (I believe) "The Professor and the Madman" or something like
that. The book is a historical look at the 70-year project that was the initial
compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of the fascinating bits
that came out of that interview was that so much of the project was purely
volunteer labor.

And on the subject of "qualified" volunteers, one of the greatest contributors
(and the inspiration for the title) was a (probably) paranoid schizophrenic
murderer institutionalized in an asylum.

Sure, the project George described might be massive, but there's no limit to
what a dedicated group of volunteers can do. It ain't gonna happen overnight,
that's for sure, but it can be done and I for one applaud those willing to
serve. And btw, count me among that group.

Mike

John Renish said:

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.


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