I actually have a very crude Perl script to do something like that, but
I haven't used it for awhile. If no one else bites on the project, I can
take a look at what I have. The most significant challenge I would
anticipate is that entries might be structured in a variety of ways, so
something customizable would be needed, which would require someone
knowing a little bit of Perl. But what I do is mostly search and replace
using regular expressions. It's the extent of my programming knowledge.
One other option I am looking into, since at textonline.org we are using
WeSay do develop lexicons that ultimately will end up in SWORD, is
creating a script or xsl file to go from LIFT XML to TEI XML. I haven't
tried to do that yet, but you could export from FieldWorks to LIFT and
then run the script. I don't plan to tackle this real soon, but it could
be another option.
But a more experienced person who is more than just a tinkerer like me
could probably help you out very quickly. MDF files are very simple.
Daniel
On 04/17/2011 08:11 PM, Luke Schroeder wrote:
Does anyone with a basic knowledge of programming see any merit in the
following idea? Make a script that takes basic components of a
dictionary and formats it alphabetically into the sword imp format.
The imp format being as follows:
$$$word in another language
Definition or gloss of word immediately below.
The dictionary format being the standard used by Bible translators,
called MDF (Manual for Dictionary Formatting?) and adapted in the
SIL's program Fieldworks. My idea of a script would be to allow the
user to input the backslash codes into the script for the word, sense
number, part of speech, definition, example sentence, example sentence
translated. In our dictionary these codes would be: \lc, \sn, \ps,
\ge, \xv, \xe but in others dictionaries they would want the ability
to adapt the backslash codes a little since often Fieldworks gives
backslash codes that include the language name. The script would then
output a file in imp format. The file would look like this:
$$$Word
[Part of speech] [Definition] (1st sense of word)
[Example Sentence]
[Example Sentence translation]
[Part of speech] [Definition] (2nd sense of word
[Example Sentence]
[Example Sentence translation]
etc.
It seems to me like this is very basic programming. It also seems to
me that if someone really go into the project they could do a lot more
than what I just described. Finally I find this beneficial, because
most of the Bible translation teams for minority languages are working
on dictionaries at the same time. For people like the group I work
with, the dictionary is valued more than the Bible. It is easy to get
the Bibles into Sword format. If this script were made it would be
easy to get dictionaries into sword format (at least in their most
basic form). Having the two distributed together allows interaction
between both works. It helps younger people in the language
understand the deeper words of their language.
Any programmers out their interested?
Sincerely yours,
Luke S.
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