Translation types

Glosbe is not like a standard dictionary - most dictionaries are mono or bilingual. Glosbe is multilingual, which means we try to gather translations in multiple languages at once. But as most of people are interested in bilingual dictionary (people need English-French dictionary, need of English-French-Spanish-German dictionary is pretty rare) Glosbe also supports bilingual dictionaries and allows users to search data as if Glosbe was a bilingual dictionary.

Having this said we can move into data representation in Glosbe. There are two representations in Glosbe: translations and ideas

Translations

Translations is what you usually see in a traditional dictionary. There is a phrase in first language and a phrase in second language.

This translation represents both [dog (English) → chien (French)] and [chien (French) → dog (English)]

Translations works both ways, if A translates to B then B translates to A. So if you add translation "one way" you don't have to add it reversed. It will be available immediately.

Phrases in translation can have many attributes like part of speech or gender.

Every phrase-phrase translation can be of course seen in a dictionary, but also on it's page, that describes all data for this translation we have. For example this is a page that summarizes dog(en) ↔ chien(fr) translation: /translation?l1=en&l2=fr&p1=dog&p2=chien

Translations in Glosbe are case insensitive.

Translations can be created by hand or can be generated from ideas.

You can read more about adding translation below

Common mistake Glosbe users are sometimes adding translations like: "coche" (Spanish) → "car; auto; automobile" (English). As Glosbe translations works both ways this is not good, it is much better to add three translations instead: "coche" (Spanish) → "car" (English), "coche" (Spanish) → "auto" (English) and "coche" (Spanish) → "automobile" (English) as in this case we create correct reverse translation

Ideas

Ideas in Glosbe represents some entity, that is common in multiple languages. For example a "dog" is an animal, that has a name in most of languages. When you add new phrase to the existing entity you can create multiple translations at once: we know, that all phrases in all languages already present in this idea are names for this entity. By adding phrase to "idea" you create multiple translations at once. You extend dictionaries for languages you may even not know!

Take a look at the Figure 1. below. This is an example of idea "dog".

Let's imagine now, that you speak Spanish and English and you want to add "dog"-"perro" translation. You can add simple "translation" but as well you can add "perro" to the "idea" above. If you do so you will create not only perro to English translation, but also perro to Polish, Arabic, Deutsh etc. And it doesn't matter that you don't know Polish. Some words have multiple meanings, so when you add new entries to idea please be very careful, always add not only phrase but also add "definition", so that we know which meaning of the phrase is in the idea.

Let's look closer on another example on Figure 2.

We have multiple English phrases here in this idea. So that idea is not only a source of translations but also may be a base for building a thesaurus.

Definitions from "ideas" are also reused as definitions of this phrase in monolingual dictionaries in Glosbe.

You can read more about editing ideas below

Adding translation

To add new translation please log in first. Then visit the dictionary you are interested in and click "add translation" there. Form of adding translation should be selfexplaining.

There are some things you should now about translations when you add them:

• Add one translation at a time Do not add translations with multiple synonyms like "voiture (French) = auto, car, automobile (English)" but rather split it into three translations.
• Use proper cases: not "Dog" but "dog", not "paris" but "Paris". "Dog" and "dog" are different phrases in Glosbe, if someone searches for dog, translations of Dog will not be displayed.
• Add definition If you can it's always good to add definition of the phrase added.
• Alternative word forms are welcome. You can add translation of "car" as well as "cars". Of "go" as well as "went". Also if there are multiple writing systems in your language: you are welcome to add all of them. But add each one as another translation please
• User language special characters correctly. If you don't have proper signs on your keyboard please try to find them and put proper version of the word. Don't add "sluchac" instead of "słuchać" (it's "to listen" in Polish")

You can also take a look at this short screencast:

Adding multiple translations

You can add multiple translations at once using the add multiple page.

Removing incorrect translations

Currently you can only remove your own translation. Put your mouse over the incorrect translation, the information about an author with edit icon will slide from right. Click the edit icon. You will see the translation page, where the "delete" link will be displayed in the top right corner.

Translation attributes

There are several phrase attributes in translation available:

part of speech

for example: "noun" or "verb", you can cosider using abbreviations, for example "n" or "v" if they are understandable for users

gender

for example: feminine or masculine or other information about declination type of the word

definition

description of the meaning of the word, especially important if the word has multiple meanings

note

any other information probably interesting to users, like: "vulgar" or "word specific to British English"

Important: attribute of phrase should be writter in language of this phrase.

Editing ideas

If you wish to add translations into ideas, please take a look at the page /idea/search?language=en&phrase=dog, it displays ideas containing word "dog" in English. As you see there are a lot of "ideas": as we have them from multiple sources, they are redundant very often. On that page you can also find other ideas in Glosbe. If you wish to build new dictionary for some uncommon language this page may be a good start to make fast many translations of common, well founded words like "apple", "dog", "clock" etc. Btw. in near future I hope images will be added to ideas.

If you wish to create new idea you have to create new translation with definitions, then enter edit page of this translation and there you will see option "convert to idea" and new idea will be created.

What to do, when you search for a phrase and there are multiple "ideas" with this phrase, all having correct meaning? Which one to choose? Search results are sorted by the "idea" size. It's probably the best to add phrase to the first top idea. I wouldn't recommend adding phrase to all of the ideas: I would consider it being a waste of time, it's better to add new phrase to another idea in the meantime. In the near future ideas may be marked with symbol. These ideas would be the "preferred one", so if you don't know which one to choose: choose the one with the star.

Adding pronunciation

Not available yet. You can send us audio files (for example mp3) of your pronouncation. We will add them.

Adding phrase declension

Not available yet.

Languages

Glosbe is multilingual, we support all languages from ISO 693-3 list, there are more then 6000 languages on the list. Languages on this list have short three letter codes, that we support. We moreover support two letter codes. So if you wish to visit English (en)-French(fr) you can visit /en/fr page.

At the moment Glosbe does not support regional languages, so that as Portuguese has one language code (pt) for both Brasil and Portugal, we do not distinguish them. However, you can always add a note on the newly added entry that phrase you add is specific for Brasil only or for Portugal.

There are some languages, that are absent in ISO 693-3 list. For example artificial languages or languages that were just ommited in the list. If you need a language to be added to Glosbe please contact us. We will create an artificial code for this language and you will be able to develop dictionaries as well as for all other languages.

Special characters

Many languages use characters other than a-z for writing, for example in Polish we use additional letters: "ąęśćłżźó". There are many ways computer encodes special characters, in Glosbe we use most common way which is utf8. If you don't know what utf8 is you probably use it anyway.

Sometimes you may have a problem with writing word in foreign language, as you may not have it's signs on your keyboard. There are two ways to deal with this problem. First of all in many places in Glosbe you can find the keyboard icon . If you click it a set of special characters should appear. If your mark is not there or you see some letters that are not specific for this language: please let us know via email.