Ní hé seo gearrán faoin bhfocal “gás”.
Ach bhíos ar an nguthán leis an mBord Gáis inniu. Bhí uaschamóg acu i m’ainm ar an mbille:
“O’ Conchuir”
D’iarras ar an mbean ar laghad an uaschamóg a bhainnt de, agus d’fhiosraigh mé an bhféadfadh sí (bḣíos ag iarraidh a bheith go deas) m’fhadaí a scríobh isteach.
“Oh, we can’t do that!“, agus í ag gáire léí.
This is an interesting video for me, as it’s in Occitan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeclark/3218689628/
I studied in Montpellier, south of France. It’s in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. From what I read previously “langue d’oc” comes from the fact that the local language uses a word such as “oc” for “yes” (“oui” in standardised French).
About four months ago now Irishionary.com (previously IrishDictionary.org) / FocloirGaeilge.ie launched as a new collaborative dictionary for the Irish language community. The aim of the site is to facilitate the building of an open collaborative dictionary available to the Irish language community. I haven’t worked out the details, but I want to make the database freely available (under a suitable license).
So the whole idea here is that users search the dictionary… If the word is found, great, it is shown to the user. If no matches are found, the user is asked if they would like to add that word to the dictionary if they know the translation for it. It gets added as non-validated to the database so that it is later validated by a site member who has that permission.
Basic stats. There are 2,594 Irish “headwords” in the dictionary. A headword is basically a unique string like “madra” or “scoil“. A headword can have multiple meanings, which the site calls “word entries”. There are 2,800 word entries in the database.
People submit everything and anything. As much as I could, I tried to write the wording on the pages to guide people into adding words into the database if they knew the translation. Ok, let’s look at the last 15 *Irish* headwords added to the dictionary:
dúirt
doire
salus
emphasize
josh
an
unwise
cuirm
goog morning ruth
sorry
i am very well
sweater
ma chara
symphony
muintir
You see, this is a validation pain, for want of a better term. “emphasize” is not an Irish word. “josh” is not an Irish word”. “goog morning ruth” not an Irish word, far from it!
Validation so far – quite promising. The initial stats are quite promising, I think. Of the 2,800 word entries, 844 have been validated either by myself or my sister (who I have working on the site a couple of hours a week). Each word entry can have multiple English language translations, giving us 1,182 validated English translations for those 844 headwords.
Big realisation: we have to close the compltely open-style wiki. So here I am with 30% of the word entries validated. If we’re able to validate 100 word entries a week, we’ll probably never reach the end of the queue, as there are always new words being added by visitors. While the quality of the added words are very good from the handful of registered users, unfortunately the vast majority of content added by non-registered users cannot be used in a dictionary. That does not take away from the visitors who do enter valid words!
The conclusion. In the future, the dictionary wiki feature will be closed to non-registered visitors. People will be welcome to register, but the cost (effort) of registration will definitely mean a focusing on quality content.
Search stats may be (part of) the future. I want to say go raibh maith agat to everyone who has been using the dictionary. The site currently has 1,000 daily visits, which shows demand is out there for a proper solution. There were a huge 110,000 searches in the past month. With this data, we can prioritise the addition of words that are in high demand that are yet to be added to the foclóir. In the meantime, users are welcome to add words that are of interest to them personally.
You can visit the dictionary through the English language interface at Irishionary.com or bain úsáid as as Gaeilge ar FocloirGaeilge.ie.
GaeltachtTravel.com now features our An Ghaeltacht 2009 Calendar (which was previously release for free as a PDF). It features 12 beautiful photos of some of the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland.
You can get yours for $25.15, and you can get 40% off by using the promotional code CALENDARSAVE at checkout before December 15th 2008.
During my daily blog read, I came across StateStats. That site analyses available Google data to show the correlations between searchers in U.S. states in relation to different cross setction (e.g., gender and income).
So I decided to have a quick look at the geographical analysis of visitors to the www.irishgaelictranslator.com domain. It’s interesting to see where people are coming from. Actually, this is of interest to my new job that I’ll be starting in mid-January. (It’s based in Co. Tipperary, and I’ll blog about it later.)
Here’s our world map of “visits”. A visit is… a visit!… It’s all pages you view on the site in one session. A session ends after a certain time of you not doing anything on the site. The countries visiting this site:
You can maybe see that the scale in the bottom right goes from 1 to 62,206. That big number indicated by dark green is the number of U.S. visitors as this is the site’s main source of traffic. (All stats are for the past 30 days). During this period, there were a total of 124,896 visits from all around the world.
Here’s where people in Ireland are visiting from:
Obviously, Dublin is the big hub of activity. But visits are scattered around the country. To be honest, I’m glad that that many Irish people are visiting the site, given the “Irish Gaelic” label we have.
The other of the top-three countries according to number of visits is the U.K., and here is the map of visitors:
I’d like to have more people from the Scottish Highlands visiting! 
The U.S. is the country where by far the most visitors come from. So it’s interesting (for me at least!) to dig down through the states.
Obviously, the big visitors here are California and Nua Eabhrac. Californians account for 6,744 visits, and New Yorkers account for 5,869 visits.
California locations are as follows… Ola!
And New York is as follows, obviosuly with a high concentration on New York City.
While we’re looking at the maps, I think it’s interesting that the maps probably indicate where all the Irish and decendents of Irish people are located in the U.S.. But maybe there are additional reasons for the spread (and concentration) of visitors?
The third-busiest U.S. state for this site is Pensilvania, a place where I don’t have any conceptual image of, to be honest. Maybe I should read up more on it! Or you can reply here and tell me what I should know!
Sin é! Any additional comments?
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