Dears developers;

I love Skritter; however it is shame that there is not a version in foreign languages.

As you can notice English is not my maternal language and many times I have to copy and paste the words in a web translation to understand the meaning. So, I was wondering about the option to make a similar “Look up more information about this word” in Yellowbrige, Wiki and others, adding one extra option to send them for translation to http://translate.google.com/?hl=es# for example.

I know this is a major petition but in the meanwhile I believe that is an easy solution.

Thanks in advance.

English is my native language and I still have to lookup some of these crazy translations that put on words and characters haha.

mcfarljw - I agree! Just the other day I learned 'cinnabar' and struggled to remember 'vermilion' when 朱 was added to my queue...

I personally would be happy to help translate some stuff into German (as long as it's not like everything^^).
I'm sure there would be some others who would also chip in and perhaps you could even offer a month or two of free skritter use as a thank you...although the link to a translation site would also be good, a full translation of at least the definitions and the menu would make it a lot more user friendly for non native English speakers.

I'd like to see definitions in Chinese.

We've been starting to mull ideas for this recently here at Skritter HQ. I think the most promising thing would be to find some base corpus that we can freely or cheaply use as a seed, and then allow users to add and edit definitions in their own language or Chinese from the practice page. Potentially to kickstart progress we could hire some people.

But yeah, the definitions would show up in your chosen language when available, and in English when not (allowing you to add them). Without a good seed (which we haven't found yet but haven't looked hard), things would start really slow, but perhaps even then it'd be doable.

Translating the rest of the web interface is a separate thing but one that could also be worth doing sooner.

I would be happy to help with translating into Spanish and would be even more motivated if it resulted in free Skritter time.

In the meantime maybe you could add Chinese-Spanish, Chinese-French, etc. links to the dictionary drop-down? There are many. This site has Chinese-Spanish, -French, -Polish, etc.

http://www.chino-china.com/diccionario

James

I know that there is a free Chinese-German dictionary available called HanDeDict that would probably be helpful.

I could translate into Spanish and Portuguese wiiii

A community based translation sounds a good idea to me.

I could help in the Hungarian translation if there is any need for that...

I could help out with Spanish translation, if I get time.

I would imagine that the biggest need would be to translate the Skritter site itself, as there are so many existing resources to translate Chinese characters into various languages.

Maybe it could be set up using a wiki? Then the developers could drop their resource bundles (i.e. files with the text that goes on the web site) on the wiki and the Skritter community could start translating them wiki-wiki-style.

James

Dear mates and Nick,

Thank you so much for all you answers and kindly consideration.

Of course, I would like a full Spanish Skritter, unfortunately I do not know enough English to be confident in translation but I would like to help.

Just to know, what does means Skritter in English?

@jlm2jlm2: "Skritter" is a nonsense word that suggests a certain sound. It's onomatopoeia. If a little animal is running around under your bed, you might describe the sound as "skrittering".

Here's a literary example:

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale...
- Wallace Stevens, "Autumn Refrain"

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=95136711

James

I also thought it was because things starting with "scri" in English are often to do with writing, e.g. script, scribe. And it sounds like Twitter

The little guy in the logo is a Skritter. They are a class of beast, yes.

It was an accident that it sounds like Twitter.

lol

Now I can sleep well knowing that the noise under my bed just means that I am dreaming with the funny “Skritters”, I hope they do not evolution to “Gremlims”.

There is a big online dict (http://bkrs.info/) of Chinese in Russian and I periodically look up there for details there coz some stuff just better translates into Russian than English.
That dict has very simple interface. I would appreciate if Skritter could load articles from there.

I could add Finnish translations but I suppose the need for that is not huge...

cause it's an academic edition of Chinese-Russian very big dictionary, melted with huge word and term lists in English: in total 1 mio entries so far. Original edition is here http://allanguages.info/db/dviewer/bkrs2.html .. or if you happened to have a paperback:-)

the four-volume Great Chinese-Russian Dictionary, edited by I. M. Oshanin (Moscow: Nauka, 1983–1984). Oshanin’s 16,000-character, 250,000-word Dictionary is an unprecedented reference work. By the sheer number of entries and its usefulness to different fields of application it has no analogue in any European language.

http://bkrs.info/slovo.php?ch=%E6%8F%8F%E8%BF%B0

a sea of compounds...

Looks like that BRKS dictionary is going to be usable for seeding a Russian version--awesome!

one more good thing about it - you can download it and use offine with lingvo v.12 that is easy to find

pass: bkrs.info
http://bkrs.info/download.php

or even more chin-chin and chin-eng dictionaries @

http://www.vostokopedia.ru/index.php/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%9A%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%B4%D0%BB%D1%8F_Lingvo

ALL can be used at the same time within one program's core