Multilingual Idioms And Proverbs: Wiki As A Tool In Collaborative Translation

From WikiSym 2008

Idioms represent a window on a community’s linguistic culture. Proverbs, from which idioms often draw on, are an expression of popular wisdom, which is why they exist in a big variety of forms and nuances. It is evident that such expressions represent a great difficulty for a translator. But the cultural debate that emerges from their study involves translators, linguists and the whole community of speakers! Such oral knowledge, for its changeable nature, is hardly held and registered in collections and conventional dictionaries. For this reason the Wiki as a collaborative and open tool, seemed to us the ideal instrument to open the confrontation.

This work aims to provide a useful tool to translators, linguists and students who want to study and find equivalences of idioms and proverbs in different languages. We want to create an extensive multi-word expressions and proverbs corpus, overcoming the main problem of their classification, thanks to hypertext and key-word based search: a synthesis of a glossary and a forum, easily consulted; open to each external contribution, in regard to the changeable nature of such linguistic heritage.