DACCO

During the month of January we have added 498 new entries to Dacco (200 to the English-Catalan side of the dictionary and 198 to the Catalan-English side). We would like to thank those who have signed up to the 'Open Social Dictionary Experiment' and helped to improve the dictionary with corrections, new entries and additions to existing entries. Thanks to Jessica, Eva, Lori, Stephanie, Josep and Cristina. Cheers guys! We really appreciate your contributions.

We are trying out a few new experiments that should make it easier for you to share comments and feedback on DACCO dictionary entries with us and your friends.

Try a search using the box above and start commenting on the results!

This week we have introduced a new section to the Dacco website: a video library. A permanent link in the upper part of the right-hand sidebar links users to a series of videos in Catalan (we will be adding more in the coming days and weeks). Each video is accompanied by a transcript. The transcripts scroll automatically as you listen to the video and the section you are currently listening to is highlighted, making it easier for you to keep track of where you are. In addition (and this is something that we are still working on perfecting, so please bear with us), a number of words in each transcript have a 'hover-over' feature which means that when you hover your mouse over them, a box appears with the appropriate Dacco dictionary entry for that word. This is still very much a 'work in progress' but we wanted to share it as soon as we could. As ever, any feedback to daccoinfoyahooes (just add the at sign and the dot in the right places) is very welcome, even if it's just to let us know that you find it useful. You can access the first set of videos (representing different varieties of Catalan) by clicking on the following link:
www.catalandictionary.org/eng/?q=node/59

We are actively working on new transcripts and better functionality, so please check back regularly to check what's new.

One of the Dacco team - Carles Pina - recently got the chance to give an overview of our project in a Lightning Talk at Fosdem (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting). Fosdem is the largest meeting of free software developers in Europe with 4,000 participants and takes place in Brussels.

The talk went well with a 15 minute presentation about Catalan culture, Dacco's history and an explanation of how Dacco and qdacco work. Interest from the audience was high and Carles was surprised to discover that more than 80% were aware of what Catalan was. Following the talk there was a lot of discussion amongst interested people about open source dictionaries, semantic webs and other related topics.

Anybody wanting to contribute to Dacco can do so by "Suggesting an Entry" or joining the "Mailing List". Contribution is open to everybody - you don't have to be an experienced linguist - and the mailing list is a friendly and relaxed forum where everybody's opinion is valued and taken into account. When new entries are suggested for inclusion in the dictionary, this is always their first stop where their quality is strengthened as they are discussed and debated by the members of the list (a group of Catalan speakers and English speakers from both sides of the Atlantic). So, if you're interested in getting involved in our community and helping to drive Dacco forward, don't be shy - join the mailing list, introduce yourself and dive right in. You can be sure you'll be met with a warm welcome.

Are you a learner of Catalan who would like to use a Catalan monolingual dictionary alongside Dacco but you find Catalan monolingual dictionaries too overwhelming and difficult to understand? If so, you might want to take a look at the on line 'DIDAC' by Enciclopèdia Catalana. This is actually a monolingual dictionary aimed at Catalan primary and secondary school children but, as such, it is written in pretty basic Catalan, it contains fairly simple and easy-to-understand examples and the definitions are much easier to understand and less overwhelming in size than those provided by the Diccionari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans or the Diccionari de Llengua Catalana from Enciclopèdia Catalana. If you haven't already, give it a go. It might be just the tool you were looking for.

We released a new version of the printable dictionaries on Saturday (Oct. 6th). The latest version has around 800 more headwords in the English > Catalan dictionary and 700 more in the Catalan > English dictionary. We have also made some slight changes to how we release the dictionaries. Firstly, we changed the way we name each release (going from 0.1, 0.2... to 2007-10, 2008-02, etc. so that you can easily see how recent the latest version is). Secondly, instead of having them available as separate downloads (Cat>Eng and Eng>Cat), there is now only one zip file to download which contains both.

Click here to download the latest version.

Screenshot:

There is a new version of qdacco available for download both for GNU/Linux (and other Unix platform) (file with data, file without data) and for Windows.

This new version has many improvements in functionality. Click 'read more' to find out what they are.

You can now add DACCO to your own website. Go to this site and see how to generate the HTML you need.

You can also add the gadget to your Google homepage. Just click this button to get started.

A new version of the printed dictionaries has just been released. This version contains 12,471 entries in the Catalan-English dictionary and 15,056 in the English-Catalan dictionary. You can download the new dictionaries here:
English-Catalan
Catalan-English