Criteria for languages?

[Caoimhin O Donnaile]

> Are these bilingual dictionaries, or are they meant for native
> speakers? Native speakers don't need dictionaries for nn vs. nb.  
> Foreigners would need the right kind of dictionary to get useful
> results, as too many lookups would fail.

At the moment I don't have a lot for Norwegian.  I have

 - Bokmålsordboka
   http://www.dokpro.uio.no/perl/ordboksoek/ordbok.cgi?ordbok=bokmaal
   nb->nb

 - Nynorskordboka
   http://www.dokpro.uio.no/perl/ordboksoek/ordbok.cgi?ordbok=nynorsk
   nn->nn

 - EUdict
   http://m.eudict.com/?lang=noreng
   nb->en

(Hope these are all correct)
But I am finding new online dictionaries all the time.

I am assuming that the monolingual dictionaries might be useful
to advanced learners as well as to native speakers.

There are also some multilingual dictionaries which include Norwegian:

 - Sensagent
   http://dictionary.sensagent.com/{word}/no-en
   nb->en
   http://dictionary.sensagent.com/til/no-fr/
   nb->fr
   etc.

 - Google Translate
   http://translate.google.com/?sl=no&tl=de&ie=utf8
   nb->de
   http://translate.google.com/?sl=no&tl=fr&ie=utf8
   nb->fr
   etc.

I had been using code "no" for Norwegian, but when I came across
Bokmålsordboka and Nynorskordboka, I switched to distinguishing
Bokmål (nb) and Nynorsk (nn), and assumed, rightly or wrongly,
that everything which I had previously labelled "no" should be
labelled "nb".

So to get a "Wordlinked" version of the Bokmål Wikipedia and
Nynorsk Wikipedia, respectively, you now use the URLs:

 http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/wordlink/?sl=nb&url=http://no.wikipedia.org/
 http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/wordlink/?sl=nn&url=http://nn.wikipedia.org/

Note that I am using code "nb" for Bokmål, even though Wikipedia
is still using "no".  Likewise, to make use of the Sensagent
and Google Translate "multidictionaries" for Norwegian (Bokmål),
I now have to translate between my code "nb" and the code "no"
which Sensagent and Google Translate are still using.
(Which is actually no problem because I have a system for that)

The other translations from my "more appropriate??" codes
to Google Translate codes which I currently have in my
table are:

  pes->fa
  zh-Hans->zh-CN
  zlm->ms


(If anyone is trying out Wordlink, by the way, please forgive its
target language and dictionary selection mechanism which is still
in a bit of a mess.  It needs some work and some Javascript.
Currently you just have to fumble around a bit.  In some
language combinations, too, Wordlink isn't of much use yet
because of lack of lemmatisation in dictionary lookups, while
for others it is working well.  The non-European languages
are mostly in there "by accident" and untested.)

Caoimhín