A Hebrew translation of all the standard dictionaries

[EvanAad]

Please find attached all the standard dictionaries, translated to Hebrew.

translator-basic-dictionary-Hebrew.txt translator-bibliography-dictionary-Hebrew.txt translator-environment-dictionary-Hebrew.txt translator-months-dictionary-Hebrew.txt translator-numbers-dictionary-Hebrew.txt translator-theorem-dictionary-Hebrew.txt

Important notes.

1. The standard, and most commonly used Hebrew equivalent of and is not a standalone word, but a prefix. This requires special handling that I don't know how to do. A solution to the problem in the case of biblatex was suggested here.

   Similar remarks apply to the Hebrew equivalents of "to" and "from", though these words may have appropriate standalone versions, depending on context. For instance, "from (sender of an email)" may have a reasonable standalone Hebrew translation, but "from (place)" does not have a standalone Hebrew translation, only a prefix. This is very context-sensitive.

   This issue surfaces also in the "in" entry of the bibliography dictionary.

   By the way, similar considerations (probably even more complicated than in Hebrew) apply to agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, and Turkish, perhaps not w.r.t. to the word "and", but with respect to "in" and "from".

2. Hebrew grammar is heavily gendered. In particular, the words for author and authors are gendered, and - especially in the case of a single author - cannot be given a single word translation. Ideally there should be three, or even four versions: author (male), author (female), author (male/female), author (female/male), and the same for authors. The same applies to the words "editor"/"editors" in the bibliography dictionary. This issue also surfaces in the numbers dictionary, especially in the ordinals.

   By the way, this is also relevant to many European languages, and I'm surprised this has not yet come up with respect to other languages with uploaded dictionaries, such as French, German, Italian, Spanish.

3. Hebrew grammar is heavily sensitive to singular-plural distinctions. Hebrew has a very small number of collective nouns (not sure this is the linguistically correct terminology; perhaps "uncountable nouns" is better) in comparison with English. For instance the words "sheep" and "work" have different grammatical forms in Hebrew depending on whether they refer to an individual sheep/piece of work, or to a multitude of sheep/pieces of work. In particular, the term "related work" should have two versions: "related work (singular)", and "related work (plural)". However, if "related work" is intended to be used as a section heading, I guess the plural form is the correct one, which is the form I used in the attached files.

   This issue surfaces also in the "Tech. Rep." entry in the bibliography dictionary. Is "Tech. Rep." an abbreviation for "Technical Report" or "Technical Reports"?

4. In the bibliography dictionary, is "ed." an abbreviation of "edition" or of "editor"? I translated it as "edition". The same applies to "eds."

5. The environment dictionary: context is everything for translating these terms appropriately.

6. A general word of advice/opinion: the package translator, in its very essence, deals with languages, and should probably have been designed, and should be developed in consultation with a linguist, or at least a polyglot.

[EvanAad]

I've just updated the file translator-basic-dictionary-Hebrew.txt. I changed the translation of the word "figure" to coincide with the translation produced automatically by the babel package.

[EvanAad]

I've found the file that babel taps for Hebrew translations of various terms. Here it is. I'll adjust my translations to coincide with those used by babel, where appropriate. However, I won't be able to do so till tomorrow.

[EvanAad]

OK. I've synchronized my translations with babel's. The only file that was updated was ...basic.... In three cases I decided to let my translations differ from those of babel:

1. babel translates the word "preface" as ״מבוא״, however according to the Hebrew academy, "preface" should be translated as "הקדמה". This is born out in practice by a Hebrew translation that I own of David Burton's "Elementary Number Theory". The translation was published by the Israeli Open University. In this translation Burton's "Preface" chapter is translated as "הקדמה".

2. babel translates "see" as "ראה", and "see also" as "ראה גם". These expressions are gendered in Hebrew. The verb is conjugated in the male singular form. In the particular case of this idiomatic expression, it is possible to abbreviate the verb to its initial letter (see the 3rd definition in this entry in the online Sapir Hebrew dictionary, and my hardcover Even Shoshan Hebrew dictionary - on which the Babylon translation app is based - contains a similar entry). When abbreviated this way the gender and and plurality markings drop, and the written form can thus be interpreted in a more flexible way as either male or female, and either singular or plural. I decided to use the abbreviated form, rather than the one chosen by babel.