What is it?

An effort to improve coverage of non-English languages in the JMdict and kanjidic2 dictionaries. These two dictionaries are the main sources of many Japanese-related open-source projects (Tagaini Jisho of course, but also jisho.org, JWPCE, etc.). They are invaluable resources for the student of Japanese, but unfortunately mostly limited to English, with translations in other languages incomplete and even sometimes incorrect. This effort aims at improving both the coverage and quality of these translations by involving the community.

How is it released? It is limited to Tagaini Jisho?

The project is still young. It will be released as an enriched, compatible version of the JMdict/kanjidic2. In the future, we hope to have them directly integrated into the original projects.

Although tagaini.net is used as a host for the project, the result is not limited to Tagaini Jisho. The data will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

How to participate?

The actual effort takes place on Transifex. We extract the Japanese words/kanji and English definitions as a source string, and ask contributors to translate the English meaning into their language.

Requirements

In order to maintain a high level of quality, we have a few requirements before accepting someone into a language team. Make sure you understand and can comply with them:

1. You must have native level of the language you are translating into, and be capable of writing it without mistakes or spelling errors.
2. You must understand English enough to avoid mistakes and ambiguities in your translations.
3. It is a good idea to also understand Japanese to further limit the possibility of mistakes in your translation.
4. Your translations will never go beyond the semantic range of the English translation. Sometimes you will find that a Japanese word has a wider meaning than the one expressed in its English translation. In such cases, please do not translate beyond that incomplete translation. The reason for that is that the same entry is present somewhere else, with other English meanings that complete the translation you are currently doing. Once again, please do not go beyond the semantic range of English as it will make the resulting data inaccurate.

Also, please subscribe to the following mailing list in order to receive important announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/jmdict-i18n

How to translate

Ready to participate? Great! Just register an account on Transifex and either ask to join an existing language team or to create a new one if no team exists for your language. You can then start translating a resource, preferably starting from the ones with a higher priority. On the left side, you will see the entry in Japanese and its English translation. On the right side, you are expected to enter the corresponding translation in your language:

Note that you must not copy the Japanese part into your translation - it is only here as a helper. Please write your translation using the English meanings as a guide, but using the original Japanese word as much as possible to avoid direct translation from English. As for the English translation, one line per meaning - but be aware that your translation does not need to have the same number of lines as the English one. If your language needs more of less definitions to express the same meaning, do what is best to ensure clarity.

Do not start the translation with a capital, unless the starting word requires it by rule. In general, try to follow the same format as the English translation.

Transifex gives you a very handy interface for translations. Using "tab" and "shift tab", you can quickly move to the next or previous entries. By doing so, the translation you were doing will be automatically saved. If you meet an entry you are not sure about, don't worry! Just skip it, and someone else will surely have an adequate translation for it.

The order in which you translate things is also important. Japanese and kanji entries are grouped into "resources", some of which have a higher priority than others. Please try to complete one resource before starting another one. This is to ensure that quality and regression can be tracked efficiently - once a resource is completed, other users can review it and try to improve it. All the same, when we update the source strings from a new version of the JMdict, some entries may be changed and need to be reviewed again. By ensuring your resources are 100% translated, you can easily notice when this happens because the completion will drop from 100% to 99% or 98%.

Got a few hundred entries translated? Fantastic! They will be part of the next release and will be used in Tagaini Jisho and hopefully many other projects.