New tool for Yiddish dictionaries, keyboard input and transliteration

[Martin Podolak]

I have written "YIdicts", a Yiddish language tool for internet browsers which maybe could be useful for you. The tool is a bookmarklet and it includes dictionary lookup functions, a virtual keyboard and a transliteration tool.

The usage of the bookmarklet is quite self explaining. First you save the bookmarklet as a bookmark in the browser. When you visit any website and then click on the bookmarklet, there will appear a new window with text input. It displays
- a virtual Hebrew/Yiddish keyboard
- lookup options for various Yiddish dictionary and translation services
- transliteration functions for Yiddish texts or full web sites according to the YIVO romanization.

Highlighted text from the web site will automatically appear in YIdicts so you only have to choose the dictionary to look the word up. One click will directly bring you to the according dictionary entry or to the translation result.

You can try the demo on the bookmarklet's web site:
https://podolak.net/en/bookmarklets/yiddish/253-yiddish-dictionary-bookmarklet

It is free to use and everybody has free access to the code. Please note that the bookmarklet virtually work with any browser on almost any web site *except on Facebook*.

Comments and suggestions for the tool will be appreciated.

Martin

[Andrey Rozenberg]

Hi Martin,

some points of critique:
- I see no real-world use of the "Yiddish Dictionary Online" (very small) or of Yandex and Google translate (produce gibberish).
- website transliteration doesn't work properly on non-YIVO orthography (try it on wikipedia, wikisources, kave-shtibl)
- the transliteration seems to also have severe problems with words of Semitic origin, and doesn't treat specially such cases when orthography differs from pronunciation in German-origin words.
- the code is not hosted on a version control server like Github or Bitbucket (or is it?), which greatly restricts any potential collaboration, automated updates, change-logging, bug-reporting etc.

Best regards,
Andrey

-- 
Andrey Rozenberg

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Faculty of Biology, Beja's Lab
Haifa 3200003, Israel

[Martin Podolak]

Hi Andrey,

thank you for your message, it is always good to get some refreshing feedback.

It is true that the dictionaries are very small and maybe of less use for advanced and native Yiddish speakers. Still they help me as a complete beginner and I guess also other German speakers to understand words especially with non-Germanic origin. The target audience for the bookmarklets are beginners.

And yes, I am also no big fan of automated translation as provided by Google and Yandex but I think it may be of some use for non-Yiddish speakers.

As being new to Yiddish I was not aware of differences in orthographies of Yiddish. However, the bookmarklet's romanization of text and websites is not a *transcription* function which takes into account pronounciations or different orthographies so is does not aim to transcribe text with YIVO-orthography.

As *transliteration* it is not more or less as a Latin representation of Hebrew letters according to the YIVO transliteration table. I guess that why the Library of Congress explicitely notes that they ignore the etymology of words in transliterations, see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/hebrew.pdf. I am actually planning to add the transliteration schemes of the Library of Congress (and ISO) to the bookmarklet.

Indeed, it would be a good idea to have some transcription function in the bookmarklet which does take the actual pronounciation into account. I think that would only be possible if the Yiddish text gets checked against a large database containing information on the pronounciation of each individual word. Would be great to find such an open-access source on the internet which has some kind of API for that, maybe I will be able to do something with the Glosbe API. Please let me know if you have any ideas in that direction as e.g. databases, APIs, other implementations etc.

It is a good idea to put the code on GitHub, haven't thought about it yet because I never really worked with it. I think that I will put the code there as soon I have time. Will announce it here when I have done so.

Martin

[martin....@gmail.com]

Hi,

The bookmarklet is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/pod-o-mart/dictionaryBookmarklets.

Martin

[martin....@gmail.com]

Hi,

The bookmarklet is now availabe at GitHub: https://github.com/pod-o-mart/dictionaryBookmarklets.

Martin