July 12, 2010

The Floating Sheep translation project

As many of our readers have pointed out, a key issue with the methods that we have been employing for some of our maps is that we usually only conduct searches in English. With that criticism in mind, we have decided to perform a search for eight words (food, mother, house, land, family, love, water, sex) in sixty-six languages that are commonly spoken in Europe (we are limiting the search to Europe for the time being).

But to do this we need your help. We'd like to ask all of our readers to take a quick look at our spreadsheet of languages and suggest appropriate translations for any of these words in any languages that you know.

We are well aware that in some languages the selection/spelling of words depend upon the context and grammar. So there will be comparability issues, but we'd like to give it a try anyway.

You are welcome/encouraged to record your name in the comments section of the spreadsheet, and we may even send a floating sheep t-shirt to some of the most prolific contributors.

2 comments:

  1. Hi guys,

    check out the GoogleTranslate-Funktion in your spreadsheet.
    For Portuguese, i have insert two functions for "mother" and "House" as an expamle.

    =GoogleTranslate(C1,"en","pt")
    =GoogleTranslate(D1,"en","pt")

    For the Country-Code, use the ISO-Language-Code.

    BTW: maschine translation is not perfect ;-)

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.