Saturday, August 1, 2020

Updated Dictionaries and Major Improvements for Swedish

Once again, the lastest improvements in Wiktionary made their way to WikDict. This does not only increase the number of translations but also their quality, since more details are added and errors are corrected continuously. Go to WikDict.com and try it out!

Swedish Improvements

Additionally, this update brings major improvements for the users of WikDict's Swedish dictionaries. Thanks to Gilles Sérasset's tireless work on dbnary, word inflections and genders are now extracted from the Wiktionary markup, which in turn allows WikDict to process this information and include it in the data set. Swedish the forth language to gain this support after English, German and French.

These improvements are visible to users in the following ways:

Gender Is Shown for Nouns

When looking up nouns, you will see either "{n}" for neutrum or "{u}" for utrum after the noun to indicate it's gender. In some cases this information is not shown because either:
  • the gender is not included in the Wiktionary page or
  • the word can have either gender, depending on its specific meaning
One prominent example for the latter is the word "hus", which is usually neutrum but not in all cases, as can be seen on the Wiktionary page.

Search Finds Conjugated Verbs

When reading texts, verbs usually don't appear in the infinitive. If you stumbled across the word "log" in a Swedish text, you would have had trouble to find the translation in WikDict until now, since it is a conjugated form of the verb "le". Now, you will get "le" as a result when searching for "log". There's no explicit indication of the conjugation in the results yet, which will hopefully change in future versions of the WikDict web interface.

Search Finds Inflected Nouns

The same mechanism also with other inflected words like nouns. It is not obvious to everyone that "lärarnas" is a form of the word "lärare". And even when you can get to that conclusion, it is often easier to just search for words in the same form in which you see them used, instead of going to their base form first. WikDict will do the work for you and show "lärare" as a result when you search for "lärarnas" or any of its other forms.