Show HN: Using Wikipedia as a dictionary

Show HN: Using Wikipedia as a dictionary(wikitranslateitfor.me)

8 points by pszczurko 11 years ago | 4 comments

pszczurko 11 years ago |

Whenever I wanted to see how an English titled movie was called in another language I would look it up on Wikipedia, scroll down and click the corresponding language that I wanted on the left hand side. Well this little app does exactly that. The query inputted does not have to be a movie title, it can be anything that you want translated from English to another language. If a specific language is selected, you get to see a side by side comparison of Wikipedia translation and dictionary translation (powered by Yandex). This app is not perfect, but it has the basics needed to work. As of right now the app just picks the first Wikipedia article that it finds for the given query. In the future I plan to allow a user to pick from many related titles that Wikipedia returns. If you follow the link, on there you will find a link to the source on Github. Let me know what you think!

kenrick95 11 years ago | |

Nice work :)

Although I think you should emphasize that the input should be in English. When I tried it out, I did not know it and hence put in an article name in some other language hoping to see its English name. (maybe you can do the reverse of what has been done too :) )

pszczurko 11 years ago | | |

Good point! I'll try to emphasize that more. And yes the plan at one point is to do the reverse as well, or dictionary of any language to any language :)

java-man 11 years ago |

I had a project to use wikipedia as a sort of universal translation memory for scientific/technical terms. Thought of possibly making it into a service, even though it's just as easy to look things up on wikipedia.

For all of us bi- and multi-linguals it would be nice to have a setting in wikipedia to present languages we comprehend and filter all other.