Look up the right word, learn how to pronounce it and translate what you want to say into Hungarian.
It is all about understanding each other,
François. Whenever we open up a dialogue with someone from
another country, we are making an attempt to establish a common
ground for communication, usually choosing one language both can
understand or, if that fails, translating back and forth.
Quoi? Of course, you are right,
mon ami. Sometimes it is difficult to make
yourself understood even by those who share your language. Thinking
you know what a word means is no guarantee the person you are
talking to interprets that word in the same way. That is one of the
reasons we have dictionaries—that and
Scrabble.
Ah,
mes amis! It is good to see you all.
Welcome to
Chez Marcel, home of fine Linux
fare and great wines from the world over. Please sit and be
comfortable. François and I were discussing the challenges
of being understood and of properly getting your meaning across.
François, as you already know all this, quickly go down to
the wine cellar and bring back the 1999 Napa Valley Cabernet
Sauvignon we were tasting earlier—or rather submitting to quality
control.
Words are important and the
right words
even more so, as every writer can tell you. This especially is true
when you are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't share
your language. Using your Linux system, you can take some joy in
knowing that you are helping to improve understanding between
yourself and others.
The meaning of words, true or otherwise, may be no more than
a click away. If you are running KDE 3.0 or higher, try this trick.
Let's say you want to find the definition of “cooking”. Open up
Konqueror, then type
dict: cooking in the
Location field. Press Enter, and Konqueror does a search for you in
the
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. To do a
thesaurus lookup, type
ths: cooking
instead.
KDE has a nice, integrated dictionary application called
Kdict, part of the kdenetwork
package. You'll most likely find Kdict in your Utilities menu under
the KDE application launcher (the big K). You also can launch it
from the shell with the program name
kdict
(Figure 1). Enter and Kdict connects to various on-line
dictionaries to pull up the appropriate definition. Those resources
include the
Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
Wordnet,
The Jargon File,
The Devil's Dictionary and others.
For rapid-fire access to Kdict, you can pop a handy little
applet into your Kicker panel. Here's how: right-click on the big
K, select Panel menu®Add®Applet®Dictionary. Now, you
should see a new program applet labeled Dictionary with three small
buttons to the top right on your Kicker panel. On first start, only
the C button is visible (define selected text), and the other two
are grayed out.
Enter text into the small window, either a word or a phrase,
press Enter, and Kdict appears with that definition as collected
from the various sources. You also can select (double-click) a word
on a web page or document you are viewing and click that C button
in the applet. Kdict automatically launches and provides the
definition for the selected word.
If you aren't running KDE or if you prefer a simpler
approach, may I interest you in a lightweight, text-only client
that does a similar thing? It's Vishal Verma's
edict; I wonder if he looked that
word up in the dictionary. You can get edict from
edictionary.sourceforge.net.
The edict program is nothing more than a Perl script, but it does
the job quite nicely. In terms of installation, there really isn't
much to do after extracting the tarred and gzipped bundle. You can
run the script from the directory in which it was extracted, but
you'll more than likely want to run a
make
install to save the script to /usr/bin.
To run the program, type
edict followed by
the word you want to look up. For a synonym lookup, type
ethes followed by a word. If the word you are
looking for isn't found, alternatives are offered.
The ethes program is simply a symbolic link to edict.
Consequently, a thesaurus lookup is essentially the same process
but with different results:
[marcel@mysystem edict]$ ethes program
edict - Your personal command line dictionary.
Verison 1.0.
Looking up "program" in Merriam-Webster Online
Thesaurus...
Entry Word: program
Function: noun
Text: 1 a formulated plan listing things to be done
or to take place especially in chronological order
<the program of a concert>
Synonyms: agenda, calendar, card, docket,
programma, schedule, sked, timetable
Related Words: bill; slate; plan
Idioms order of the day 2
Synonyms: COURSE 3, line, policy, polity, procedure
Speaking of dictionaries, what is there to say about speaking
dictionaries? More to the point, what is there to say about Jeffrey
Clement's
MWSpeaker, which he
describes as the “worst speech synthesis software ever”? Those
are his words,
mes amis, not mine. The idea is
simple, if not a bit silly. You type in a word or a phrase and
MWSpeaker reads it back in human speech. The speech in question
comes from the
Merriam Webster Online
Dictionary. In short, it finds each word's corresponding
wav file, downloads it and plays it in sequence.
Given that MWSpeaker is a Python script, it requires no
compiling per se. Simply download the program from
www.jclement.ca/Projects/mwspeaker,
then unpack the tarred and gzipped bundle. Before you actually can
use the program, you need a few additional packages, most notably
wxPython, pygame and PythonCard. To run the program,
cd to mwspeaker-1.0 (where you unpacked
MWSpeaker), and type the following:
mkdir data
python mwspeaker.pyw
The data directory is where the wav files are stored. The GUI
is simple. Type a word or phrase, click Say it and wait. I say
“wait”, because MWSpeaker downloads each word's wav file in turn
before playing your selection. The results can be a lot of fun
because the voices saying the words aren't consistent. You wind up
with a strange mix of male and female voices.
All this is wonderful for the English language, but Linux and
open-source developers come from every part of the world, after
all, as do Linux users. It is true that an English language
dictionary is useful to those who don't count English as their
first language, but sometimes you must translate.
François,
remplisser les verres de nos
invités, s'il vous plâit.
To translate French (or Italian, or Spanish, or German and so
on) into English, you might find yourself looking for a Babel Fish.
What is a Babel Fish, you ask? According to Douglas Adams, the
creator of the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, it is a small yellow fish that, when put in your
ear, simultaneously translates any language you hear into the one
you normally speak. But as Douglas Adams wrote, “Meanwhile, the
poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different races and cultures, has caused more
and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of
creation.”
KDE's combination web browser, file manager and Swiss Army
knife, Konqueror, has hooks built in to AltaVista's Babel Fish.
Surf on over to a foreign language web site, and you easily can
translate the information you find there. For my example, I
randomly picked a German language newspaper,
Die
Welt, which I learned means “The World”.
When your page has loaded, click Tools on Konqueror's
menubar, select Translate Web Page, then select from one of the
language selections in the drop-down list. In my example above, I
chose “German to English”,
et voilà!
You now can read the information in a language that makes more
sense to you.
For your own personal and local translation dictionary, you
may want to consider taking a look at Ricardo Villalba's
wordtrans at
wordtrans.sourceforge.net
(Figure 4). Compiling wordtrans can be a little tricky, but it
isn't a great problem. A visit to TuxFinder
(
www.tuxfinder.org)
turns up quite a number of precompiled packages. I downloaded both
the base wordtrans package along with the wordtrans-kde packages in
RPM format and installed them. If you are downloading packages, you
do need both. You may also find a wordtrans-qt and a wordtrans-web
package.
By default, wordtrans comes with English, French, Italian,
Portuguese and Spanish translation dictionaries, but more can be
added. You'll find links to other language files on the wordtrans
web site and in the software itself. When you start up Kwordtrans,
it may appear as though nothing happened, but look at your system
tray in the Kicker panel and you'll see a little gray book icon.
Click here and the Kwordtrans interface appears. To select your
language of choice, click Dictionaries in the menubar and choose
from the list. Choose the direction of your translation (for
example, English to Spanish or Spanish to English), type in a word
and press Enter.
As I mentioned, you can add additional dictionaries by
clicking View on the menubar and selecting Introduction for some
links. This not only extends wordtrans' capabilities, but some of
the dictionaries available for download are more extensive than the
default ones. To add a downloaded language file, click Dictionaries
on the menubar, select New and follow the instructions. I
downloaded and installed several from
www.linuks.mine.nu/dictionary
with excellent results.
I'm afraid I do not speak Hungarian,
mes
amis, but apparently I would have to say
az
idõ lejárt, which my desktop translator
tells me means “time's up”. It is indeed closing time, but there
is time enough for another glass of wine before you go. Raise your
glass and my faithful waiter, François, happily will take
care of you. As you can see, with a little exploration in our Linux
kitchens, we may one day be able to communicate effortlessly with
the world. Until next time,
mes amis, let us
all drink to one another's health.
A votre
santé!
Bon
appétit! Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com
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