Obviously it's not just a Pleco for Android question, but I finally have to ask: why on earth are British spellings sometimes mixed in with American? Maybe some people don't care, but I would think there's no one who actually prefers this kind of inconsistency. Isn't it traditional in publishing to be consistent with one method or the other?
why are British spellings sometimes included?
- Thread starter JimmyTheSaint
- Start date
JimmyTheSaint said:
In which dictionaries specifically have you noticed this? Dictionaries made in China sometimes have this sort of inconsistency when you've got a mix of English-speaking editors from the US and UK/AU/NZ and they don't coordinate well, but titles developed in the US or UK generally seem to be pretty solid about sticking with one language or the other.
mikelove said:
I only have two dictionaries on my Android: PLC and CC. I've seen a lot of British spellings, but I haven't kept track of whether it's just PLC, or both. Can't you do a search an replace in PLC? For example, in the definition for "chu1se4" it says, "They accomplished their task with flying colours."
I see what you mean about terminology, but I was only referring to spellings:
colour => color
behaviour => behavior
humour => humor
honour
neighbour
rumour
harbour
savour
etc.
judgement => judgment
etc.
centre => center
theatre => theater
etc.
defence => defense
etc.
organise => organize
recognise => recognize
realise => realize
realisation => realization
etc.
analyse => analyze
paralyse => paralyze
etc.
catalogue => catalog
etc.
counsellor => counselor
modelling => modeling
etc.
The list is limited and I expect, being in your business, you can find a complete reference. Then a global search and replace that's free of false positives would be straightforward. You don't see this sort of inconsistency in publications, so I would think that tracking discrepancies wouldn't be that difficult. Pleco is a language reference, after all, so it's disheartening to see errors the industry generally considers unacceptable.
colour => color
behaviour => behavior
humour => humor
honour
neighbour
rumour
harbour
savour
etc.
judgement => judgment
etc.
centre => center
theatre => theater
etc.
defence => defense
etc.
organise => organize
recognise => recognize
realise => realize
realisation => realization
etc.
analyse => analyze
paralyse => paralyze
etc.
catalogue => catalog
etc.
counsellor => counselor
modelling => modeling
etc.
The list is limited and I expect, being in your business, you can find a complete reference. Then a global search and replace that's free of false positives would be straightforward. You don't see this sort of inconsistency in publications, so I would think that tracking discrepancies wouldn't be that difficult. Pleco is a language reference, after all, so it's disheartening to see errors the industry generally considers unacceptable.
JimmyTheSaint said:
Well yes, but we're a Chinese language reference... anyway, I can see that it might be frustrating, but the problems appear to be present in the original text that PLC is based on as well, and our dictionary-editing resources are kind of stretched thin at the moment dealing with all of our new titles; since this is more of an annoyance than a real usability problem, it's tough to make it a priority. We can certainly look at fixing this when that's all done, though.
mikelove said:
It's worth attending to because it's yet another factor that reinforces people's propensity to internalize language errors that we language professionals then have to deal with--in editing, in educational settings, etc. That it's a Chinese reference hardly mitigates the situation: I know Chinese people who use Pleco for various purposes, and it's unfortunate to see that the dictionary's English reinforces or teaches them new language errors, which they then pass on and force their colleagues to deal with. Once internalized, the problem becomes intractable because the kind of inexpensive global search and replace available to your developers isn't feasible for the human brain.
mfcb said:
Yeah, that's a significant concern; if we do get rid of all of the British spellings we'll have a bunch of angry Brits on our hands. To really do it properly we'd have to use pretty much the same system we use for simplified / traditional character set toggling; include both versions in the database and let users decide what they want. Wouldn't actually be that difficult since we already do have that system in place, just a big hassle to go through all of the databases and convert them to include both spellings.
Tezuk
举人
neilperks said:Hmmm, I bet this would start an interesting polarised (whoops, sorry!!!) debate; do you use English or American English ?
Mike, I think you would need to have 2 sets of dictionaties to avoid upsetting 50% of the users
Cheers
Neil
Sarcasm... maybe get rid of that dictionary entry. It is very British after all.
Just kidding. However, this does seem like a fuss over nothing. I trust people interested in learning Chinese, which after all is the point of Pleco, have lots of things they would like to see implemented before spelling standarisation.
neilperks said:Hmmm, I bet this would start an interesting polarised (whoops, sorry!!!) debate; do you use English or American English ?
Mike, I think you would need to have 2 sets of dictionaties to avoid upsetting 50% of the users
Cheers
Neil
Granted, you could set up a straw man and troll for a polarized "debate." But that drives off intelligent debate, and makes the non-professional approach of "do nothing--dou keyi!" sound appealing and even rational once you've driven off scrutiny.
In fact, the problem here is inconsistency, not some supposedly correct side. I would think there's no one who actually prefers this kind of inconsistency. Isn't it traditional in publishing to be consistent with one method or the other? It's really a matter of expectations, and because Pleco didn't plan for this it goes against expectations in an unproductive way. For example, British publishers consistently use British spelling and American publishers use American. Brits and Yanks have no problem reading each other's stuff. I may prefer American, but I have no problem using the OED all the time. If Mike wants to use British spelling, that would be an unusual choice for an American company, but preferable to the present haphazard situation that lacked foresight in an otherwise well-planned app.
The above example of "analyse" is especially telling. Until today, I had the expectation of a normal working dictionary, and indeed looking up "analyze" only finds "jiepou maque"--a completely useless hit. I've had many useless hits in the past, and wondered wtf was going on, but didn't have the time to figure it out. Pleco's greatest value to me is out in the field. When I face a situation of linguistic demand on the street in Taipei and Beijing, I've only got a matter of seconds--maybe a minute if I anticipate correctly--to use Pleco to refresh my memory. Pleco's not a learning tool at that point, but a tool to jog my brain into recalling what I've already learned but escapes me at the moment needed. I've looked up words like "analyze" before, and I only now see that had I thought of trying the British spelling, I'd have gotten "fenxi" and a host of other likely possibilities. But until now I had no reason to even think of that alternative spelling, having assumed Pleco conformed to professional publishing standards. Going forward, it's quite mafan de to remember to try alternate English spellings, and may not even be practicable in the field. Yes, people unfamiliar with publishing and professional standards can declare the world a carnival (would that it were so) and scream dou keyi! in their one-dimensional manner of thinking. But I would hope that a publisher wouldn't exploit low-grade, anonymous internet chatter as an excuse to mar the product's usefulness once the bad discussion has driven off the good. Implementing consistency would also eliminate the harm caused by teaching non-native speakers of English erroneous ways that they later have to unlearn or face negative consequences in the working world. Such an implemented demonstration of quality control would only enhance the product's appeal to serious-minded evaluators, and the people who declare that anything goes--that they don't care one way or the other--would still stay on board.
The search issue seems a higher priority than the entries themselves. Maybe an intelligent search that looks for different spelling variations could be added at some point. Spelling consistency seems hard to manage when you have so many different dictionaries and probably less important for an electronic dictionary that displays one entry at a time than a print dictionary that show many entries on a page.
i'm with Tezuk. if I see a word colorization, and, a few seconds later, colourisation, my flexible little brain knows it's the same word coming from two different dictionaries and moves on to what it really wants to know, which is "What is the Chinese word for colorization/colourisation?" homogenizing spelling seems to me to be a waste of time.
for chinese to english lookup thats true, but where JimmyTheSaint made his point is, when the english to chinese lookup does not bring up all the possible translations or in fact just useless ones...sfrrr said:
as easily can be seen from my posts i am not a native english speaker, and i guess quite a large number of pleco users is also. we (the non-natives) usually dont care so much about american-british spellings, in fact there is no rule which spelling to use, when it comes to communication between, lets say austrians and chinese customers... after all we have the spell checker in ms-word, if we want to ensure proper spelling in english.
but it really would be annoying, if i have to think of spelling when searching a chinese translation for an english word. as mentioned above, if i see it, i have no problem recognizing it, but if i have to anticipate that there might be additional search results if i search for a different spelling of the same word, sounds to me like a "bug" :wink:
so in my opinion, the "index" should be "repaired", but the "example" sentences in the entries are of minor importance....
slowlysteadily
Member
The "situation of linguistic demand on the street in Taipei and Beijing" is a rather melodramatic turn of phrase. Come on, you can work round it. When I started at SOAS in '87 useful lectronic dictionaries (let alone the portable kind) didn't exist. We survived both in the classroom and out on the streets as others had done also for centuries before us. Yes, consistency is desirable, but limited resources are a fact of life. Pleco and other app providers offer good products at prices a fraction of what you would have paid for a good dictionary 20 years ago. And messing around with an entire database is not something to be approached lightly - keep the law of unintended consequences in mind!JimmyTheSaint said:Granted, you could set up a straw man and troll for a polarized "debate." But that drives off intelligent debate, and makes the non-professional approach of "do nothing--dou keyi!" sound appealing and even rational once you've driven off scrutiny.neilperks said:Hmmm, I bet this would start an interesting polarised (whoops, sorry!!!) debate; do you use English or American English ?
Mike, I think you would need to have 2 sets of dictionaties to avoid upsetting 50% of the users
Cheers
Neil
Ideally my preference would be for a dictionary that accepts both British English (especially in Asia, where it seems to have some staying power) and American English. But more than that I want Pleco to produce a working dictionary soon to make a splash in the Android market and drive the competitive cycle. It's a question of priorities.
I guess ultimately I want what you want, but I feel it's important not to come over as being too strident. That might have undesirable results in terms of (a) turning people away from the forum and (b) distracting the developers from concerns that I and a few others in this thread seem to think are more pressing.
SS
There are additional complications in dealing with English which do tend to be overlooked by US speakers in particular. One is that North American English is on the fringes of English as a global language. However, would anyone but denizens of the Indian subcontinent accept their larger numbers as justifying that variant as the norm? US English in print does tend to be inconsistent in how spellings are applied, while Canadian English has two major strands - US and British English. Meanwhile, words that could be spelt in a British just wouldn't be, because the terminology is geographically restricted. The example of "colorization" above is a case in point: any speaker of non-North American English avoids adding extra syllables, and says "colouring". (There are other examples, such as "dependency" vs "dependence": by and large, US English in particular favours(!) using more syllables, just as it favours using, say, "meet with" instead of the original, sparer, "meet".) It's hardly fair to ask Pleco, which is not an English-language dictionary, to go into this in such detail.
By the way, it's a real pain that simplified characters can't be entirely removed from view when this user wants to do that. :-D
By the way, it's a real pain that simplified characters can't be entirely removed from view when this user wants to do that. :-D
Albannach said:
If it can be reduced to a straightforward batch string-search-and-replace from a reference list of alternative spellings, then it's quite fair to ask for consistency of spelling convention--whether British or American--within each dictionary. Mike, however, says it's too labor intensive to be cost effective. But it's sloppy. It's easy enough for the average customer to get used to overlooking it, unfortunately, but with language professionals, such inconsistency reflects badly on the product. When's the last time you saw a published text with mixed British/American spelling conventions?
Think of it this way: a guy goes to a job interview with soup stains on his tie. Easy enough to overlook, so when he's clearly the best for the job, he gets hired. Then he shows up at work everyday with soup stains on his tie. He's the best and smartest at his job, so everyone overlooks it because the genius always gets leeway for personal quirks. But it affects reputation, and the genius is always known as "soup stains guy," which doesn't matter with peers and regular folks, but management will always harbor hesitations. Furthermore, it's a problem introducing him to outside clients and colleagues because short term contacts negatively affect how those introducing him are seen by other big shots. So the soup stains genius is kept within the family. Practically speaking, not much of a problem, but though I show Pleco to all my colleagues (making excuses and giving reasons when the flaws are noticed), I don't dare recommend it to my superiors for wider use because in the 30 seconds they give to my pitches, the people that matter will write it off as unprofessional. And, fairly or not, the excuses and reasons will just sound like excuses and reasons.