12/25/2022 0 Comments Multilingual dictionaries![]() ![]() ![]() Nowadays, at least 1/3 of the population of African countries has a cell phone (i.e. Moreover, dictionaries are expensive to produce and costly for buyers. The Kamusi project began in 1994 when Martin, an anthropologist specialized in Africa at the time, noticed that there was no good Swahili dictionary even though it is the most frequently used language on the African continent (at least 100,000,000 people use it on a daily basis). Kamusi links languages based on concepts, which makes possible accurate multilingual connections between any number of languages. Therefore, a multilingual dictionary would allow one to differentiate between the various possible meanings of a given word by deducing equivalencies in the other languages. These two German words can then be cross-referenced to "light" in English while nevertheless maintaining the distinctions that exist in French or in other languages. Indeed, if "light" means " lumière" in French, but also " léger", then the equivalent words in German are " Licht" and " leicht". In the case of a multilingual dictionary, all of the meanings of words are theoretically linked together in all languages, which allows one to perform automatic verifications within the network of languages. The impossibility of a multilingual dictionary using previous methods of linking words through spelling instead of meaning You have to know which meaning is the right one." These tools are based on a word-for-word approach but often words have many different meanings. ![]() A more adequate translation would be: "sa démarche élancée". Martin Benjamin, who has a PhD in Anthropology and a passion for linguistics explains: "If you introduce the expression "the spring in her step" in any online translation tool, what you get in French is typically something along the lines of: "le ressort dans son étape". Online translation tools reflect the difficulty of including the specificities of each language, or even of each word. The same holds true for the equivalent French expression, "Il pleut des cordes", which, while less humorous, is every bit as imaginative. A well-known example is the expression "It’s raining cats and dogs", which certainly could not be translated literally. This approach, however, becomes more complicated when an effort is made to find equivalent expressions. Most languages contain words that do not really exist anywhere else, such as the subtle nuances between different words that mean "white" or "snow" in Inuit.īilingual dictionaries versus multilingual dictionariesįaced with all of these peculiarities and many more besides, traditional dictionaries generally limit themselves to bilingualism, which enables one to link words of equivalent meaning in two different languages. German has three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) whereas other languages draw a distinction between animate (living) and inanimate (non-living) objects. Likewise, languages such as Classical Arabic can have up to six different plural forms, which offer so many variations of the same word. Some languages have several cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, etc.), which are a series of declensions of the same word, whereas other languages have none at all. ![]()
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