Re: Debian Dictionary
Jutta Wrage wrote:
First, thx for the nice overview.
On the Debian pages, there is a dictionary [1] which is rather empty.
While searching, the only translations I found obviously are russian.
Everything found in [2] is more than three years old.
There are other dicts and glossaries as well - e.g.
http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint#Glossary
There currently are three sorts of dicts:
- The acronym dict
- Translations from and to English languages
- Monolingual Dictionaries with explanations of words or phrases.
- the dicts are bound together with links from meanings of the acronyms
to translations and from translations to glossary entries.
In a more general view a specific document lives in a hierarchy of
contexts. E.g. the Debian Installer Manual uses words which are part of
- common language, e.g. Webster's for English (or Duden for German)
- computer language, e.g. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
- Unix/Linux language, e.g.
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Dictionary/html/
- Debian language
- Debian Maintainer language
During a wording review of a document I check against a hierarchy of
dicts. This means that every word not found in an upper context needs a
definition to be understandable.
Please feel free to comment, ask or suggest.
Here my ideas for long term goals:
1) Agree on uniform format, administration and infrastructure for dicts
or glossaries within the Debian Project
E.g. docbook-xml supports AFAIK glossaries.
2) Develop or collect utilities for conversion in different formats
like dictd, HTML, TeX, plain text etc.
3) Have dicts or glossaries of debian documents in a separate file.
This makes it possible to include such a dictionary in the specific
document, or include it to other dictionaries as well.
1) to 3) are not technically difficult. It's more a problem of
coordination, standardization, discipline, and at least hard work for
the doc-writers and doc-reviewers.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
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