Talk:Dictionaries

Dictionaries and Copyright

It looks as if I will be the first to post on this talk page. This is appropriate as the subject is quite fundamental to the OLPC dictionary project and where it is (or is not) heading.

The list of dictionaries available for StarDict is quite short. This is roughly the list of dictionaries that have been available in the Free Software world for the last decade or so. Why is it that this list has not grown over the last decade?

As I brought up on IRC, no current copyright law could govern a work created before 1900, and there is little or no doubt that nearly every language in existence had dictionaries before then. The first Chinese dictionaries were created around 100AD. European dictionaries started appearing some 3 to 5 hundred years ago. During the 1800's missionaries compiled dictionaries of many, many languages. Copyright was not automagic back then, either.

The only reasonable conclusion is that there are Public Domain dictionaries in nearly every conceivable language, and that these dictionaries merely need to be digitized in order to be used. Many of these dictionaries use the Latin alphabet which is well supported by many Free and Non-Free OCR programs. Why are we, then, limited to a few dictionaries in English and wordlists of similar terms in a handful of languages?

I hope for the sake of the OLPC project, that this issue can be quickly resolved.