Friday, June 01, 2007

A long tale ISO 3166-2:US

At OmegaWiki we are awaiting some new functionality.. Erik is away for a meeting and it will go life when he gets back. In the mean time I have been playing with a new collection; the ISO 3166-2:US is a list of US American administrative units including states and territories.

I was prompted by a guy who is really working hard to add vocabulary in Khmer. He had already done the countries and territories of this world and he followed that one up with this info. What I really liked was the distribution of the translations in other countries.. There was already quite a lot. There were the languages that were almost complete, while adding the collection I added the Dutch translations.

I hope people will find the collections a good start for adding translations in their language. Particularly the Swadesh list and the language lists are relevant. The language lists are particularly relevant because they are used in the user interface.

What you notice in all these collections is that there are some that are complete or almost complete and then there is a long tail of languages with some translations.. With time we will get more languages but we will also get more languages completed for the collections.

Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

Roger S said...

A Khmer Unicode dictionary is coming online soon at SEAlang.net. It electronifies the 1977 and 1997 versions of the Cambodian-English Dictionary edited by Robert Headley, as well as the Khmer-Khmer Chuon Nath dictionary.

That will be extremely helpful to anyone learning Khmer -- and who knows English. Or for anyone who knows Khmer and wants to learn ... English.

Omegawiki, however, provides things that Headley doesn't -- connections to many languages, not just one.

And, very importantly, there are almost no geographic terms in Headley. Russia? No. London? No. California? No. There's no source online where you can find out what these words are in Khmer (or, rather, how they're spelled in Khmer; as with most languages, they're for the most part transliteration of the native word).

So rather than duplicate the functionality coming online, I am focusing on getting Khmer terms into Omegawiki that fit the profile that I see as being needed most:

- geographic terms
- computer terms
- basic words, like the Basic 1000 words list

I'm very glad there's a framework for this sort of information. Hooray for OmegaWiki!

Roger Sperberg