Multitran

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Multitran
Screenshot
Developed by Andrey Póminov (Андрей По́минов)
Written in C++
OS Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, any if use web based interface
Available in Russian / English shell
Genre Dictionary
License Proprietary for Microsoft Windows version and GPL for GNU/Linux version
Website www.multitran.ru

Multitran is an Internet system that includes the following online dictionaries:

  • English-Russian and Russian-English
  • German-Russian and Russian-German
  • Spanish-Russian and Russian-Spanish
  • French-Russian and Russian-French
  • Dutch-Russian and Russian-Dutch
  • Italian-Russian and Russian-Italian
  • Latvian-Russian and Russian-Latvian
  • Estonian-Russian and Russian-Estonian
  • Japanese-Russian and Russian-Japanese
  • Afrikaans-Russian and Russian-Afrikaans
  • English-German and German-English
  • English-Japanese and Japanese-English

The following dictionaries to be offered soon:

The developer of the Multitran software is Andrey Pominov, Moscow.

Currently, Multitran is one of the largest and most popular web dictionaries in Runet. Every day, over 90 thousand people visit Multitran.ru, and over 1.5 million search requests are processed.

Every user of Multitran can ask a question concerning translation on the Multitran forums. Multitran users also arrange offline meetings from time to time, so called 'pow-wows'. Such pow-wows were held in Moscow, St. Petersbourg and Kiev.

Contents

[edit] Features

  • Multitran's database contains over 5 million terms
  • Every registered user can expand the dictionaries online (over 1000 translators are active contributors)
  • Alphabetical, morphological, word-combination search
  • Simultaneous search in the dictionaries, forums, and in the database of English and Russian parallel sentences

[edit] Advantages and disadvantages of Multitran

The Multitran base was created by scanning a wealth of paper dictionaries and combining all the translations in one database. The huge volume of the base is both an advantage and a disadvantage because:

  • Multitran may offer well over 100 translations for a word, which complicates the task of choosing the right equivalent for beginning language learners, though it comes very handy for language professionals.
  • Search results often give duplicate translations of a term for various disciplines.
  • Multitran may give very narrow meanings of a term, suitable only for very limited contexts.
  • Multitran has a feature enabling users to check the equivalent translations, but checking each and every term may require tens of man-years of work. Every registered user can issue a warning about identified mistakes, so until a mistake is corrected, it remains marked accordingly. Multitran users have reported about 8000 mistakes using this functionality, and most of them have been corrected. Thus, users not only add their own terms (added by users are more than 180 thousand words and phrases), but also help to clean the database from mistakes.
  • The feature allowing every registered user to contribute is an advantage, but it also carries the risk that mistranslations are added to the database, because they are added arbitrarily by Multitran users and depend on the level of the contributing individual user's knowledge, which may not be up to the mark.

[edit] GNU/Linux version

An offline version of Multitran for Linux or other UNIX-like OS can be found at sourceforge.net

[edit] References

[edit] Some other online dictionaries

Languages