Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Swedish is loaded

Today Swedish language lessons have been loaded. They are without audio yet but we are going to start working on audio pronunciation as soon as possible.

Ah, by the way, recently we loaded Amharic sounds.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

How to do translation for polyglot vocabulary - Instructions

This is an article that describes how to do the instruction of Internet Polyglot vocabulary.

  • You will receive an Excel file, it will contain multiple tabs
  • First tab is "Lessons" - a list of all lessons
  • Other tabs are particular lessons
  • While translating tab "Lessons": each cell contains lesson name and description divided by "|" sign. When you translate - do the same, separate lesson name and description by |. Don't translate word-to-word, make it sound natural for your language. Some humor is useful too.
  • Individual lesson tabs (ANIMAL, PLANT, etc.). Each tab will have some words in two or more languages. Let's say you are translating to Spanish from English and French. You have to make sure that your translation works both with English and French counterparts. If you can't find a word that corresponds to both of them - skip it, just don't enter anything.
  • On lessons tabs translation should be precise - use the word that is the best (don't give a line of possible synonyms).
  • If you don't know how to translate a word - just skip it! It's better to skip it than to give an incorrect translation.
  • Articles. Most of languages have articles. For example, in Spanish it is necessary to put articles because they indicate the gender of a noun. Decide what article to put in each case (definite or indefinite) according to your language rules.
  • Adjectives - if your language have different adjective forms for different genders, use masculine form.

Most important rule: if in doubt (i.e. there is no exact translation or there are too many translations) - skip it!

First translate a couple of tabs and send me an intermediate result so that I could verify correctness and give my feedback.