Handling common proper names

[Jim Breen]

As many will know, there are only a limited number of proper names in
JMdict as we try and stick with the fairly constrained policy for
inclusion (https://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Editorial_policy#Proper_Names)
It's hard to draw an appropriate line at times, especially in cases
where a term can be a regular dictionary entry and a quite unrelated
name. (アップル?)

A good example is 日清, which occurs in the Google n-grams over 400k
times. If you look it up JMdict you'll see it's an abbreviation of
日清戦争, i.e. the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5. Does that really get it
masses of WWW hits? Not at all - 日清 is also the name of the
noodle-making food company: Nissin.

Short of bringing thousands of person/company/etc. names into JMdict,
there's not a lot can be done about this issue at the dictionary
level, which means it is palmed off to the writers of apps and
websites to help their users deal with it.

In the WWWJDIC server I've handled it in the text-glossing function by
using a combined file, and where identical headwords are in both
files, having a merged entry. That doesn't help someone simply trying
to look up 日清 in JMdict. I've finally got around to adding something
which I hope will help a bit. Where a headword occurs in both
dictionaries I'm adding an onward link to the names dictionary. You
can see this in the test-bed system at:
https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic2?1MDJ%C6%FC%C0%B6
I had no idea of the extent of the overlap, but it turns out that
about 11k entries will have these onward links.

I'll do a bit more testing, and I expect it to go live in a day or so.
Hope it helps.

Jim

--
Jim Breen
Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University
http://www.jimbreen.org/
http://nihongo.monash.edu/