Tips for working on bilingual dictionaries

This page is to catalogue tips for working on bilingual dictionaries for use in machine translation.

If you can't translate it, don't.

Example:

<e><p><l>laufabrauð<s n="n"/><s n="nt"/></l><r>traditional<b/>Icelandic<b/>deep-fried<b/>patterned<b/>Christmas<b/>wafer<s n="n"/></r></p></e>

There is literally nowhere that that description would fit fluently into a sentence. First try and find a more literal translation in the target language, for example in this case "laufa" + "brauð" = "leaf" + "bread". Check in a search engine, or one of the image search engines to make sure it comes up with the same kinds of results, and if it does use that.

As a last resort, just use the source language word in the target language, consider the following translations:

• Börnin bökuðu laufabrauð
• The children baked leafbread.
• The children baked laufabrauð.
• The children baked traditional Icelandic deep-fried patterned Christmas wafer.

People who are going to be reading machine translation have the nouse to go and search for a word they are unfamiliar with. People who are post-editting machine translation are not going to want to remove six words, to re-add one.

See also

• Bilingual dictionary