Re: Translating Lemon/OntoLex (Help wanted)

Hi,

thanks for the good work.

I've started adding my two cents in the list.

Clearly a literal translation of the terms does not work; we should really refer to terminology used in similar models as primary source. If multiple translations are acceptable, we should either leave multiple entries, or go for the most frequent one.

Finally, a double check by mother tongue speakers for Romanian, Swedish and Dutch would be great.


Regards,
Francesca
________________________________
From: johnmccrae@gmail.com <johnmccrae@gmail.com> on behalf of John P. McCrae <jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2014 6:08 AM
To: Elena Montiel Ponsoda
Cc: public-ontolex
Subject: Re: Translating Lemon/OntoLex (Help wanted)



On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Elena Montiel Ponsoda <emontiel@fi.upm.es<mailto:emontiel@fi.upm.es>> wrote:
Dear John,

Lupe and I were having a look at the translation of the ontolex labels and were wondering how "flexible" we can be with labels.

We are of the opinion that labels should be as descriptive as possible (without being definitions, of course) in order to guarantee that users understand as quick and easy as possible the meaning of the concepts behind.
It would be desirable that native users of a certain language are able to deduce what is meant by a certain label without having to look up the definition (or at least try it...). And that underestanding prevails over conciseness of the term. And not only understanding, but also fluency, I mean, using those words or expressions that are more natural and fluent to the native speaker instead of sticking to the original term in the Identifier (Not sure if it is clear what I mean...).
For example, in the case of senseRelation, instead of saying "relación de sentidos", it would be more natural to say "relación entre sentidos".
Of course... "relation of senses" is weird in English as well, "relation between senses" would be preferable in English if a preposition must be used.
IN the case of "translatable as", we would say "se traduce como" instead of "traducible por", although the latter is 100% correct and would be more faithfull to the original, so to say...
Yeah, I find the English word 'translatable' to be quite ugly... but concise. The reflexive passive seems a much better way to express this.

We were also wondering if we could use a verbal phrase in the translation of an objectProperty or dataTypeProperties.
For example: writtenRep -> "tiene representación escrita", instead of "representación escrita", so that the directionality of the relation is clear and is not to be confused with "es representación escrita de"...
I would not put the English label to "has written representation" as the direction is should be obvious from the context, thus I would avoid adding these words to other languages as well.

In fact, I am not sure we are consistent in the names we have given to Identifiers, since in some case we use "isConceptOf" (for inversed relations?), whereas for the direct relations we just use the name/term in the identifier but not the verb. The question would be, why not using the verb and preposition, if needed, in the labels for properties? It would make labels more consistent.
Adding a verb and a preposition helps clearly identify inverses from the original property, that is concept/isConceptOf is a more distinct pair than something like isConcept/isConceptOf.

As for capitalization, you have use capital leters for all labels in English. We think that it may be better to use the conventions of each language. In the case of German, capital letters for nouns vs. lower case for verbs. In Spanish lower case for nouns and verbs, etc.
Yeah with the exception of German, I think there are no fixed rules for capitalization. I have tended to use title case for the English labels as the labels feel like the titles of concepts... I am unsure what is best, but perhaps we start with lower-case, as it is easier to fix this if it seems wrong after.

Regards,
John

It's all for now. More thoughts to come.
Best,
Elena.


El 21/11/2014 15:51, John P. McCrae escribió:

Hi all,

It would be good as the goal of this group is to help people to make multilingual resources, if we made the Lemon/OntoLex model also available with multiple translations. To this end I have started to collect translations of all the labels in a spreadsheet here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yATI7qxZYD2huxExIwjQusWmT-i2M70GEc5XvZyqhKE/edit?usp=sharing

If you have the time and inclination I would greatly appreciate contributions, especially new languages.

Regards,
John



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