[lojban-beginners] Re: Firefox Add-on: Lojban Popup Dictionary

[m.kornig@sondal.net]

Selon Vid Sintef <picos.picos@gmail.com>:

> mi'e vid
>
> Would it be a hard task to make a program similar to this one:
>  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349
> ?
>
> While I'm nearly getting through the Reference Grammar, I still keep looking
> up gismus & lujvos in the lists when I read things provided by the community
> (eg. la nicte cadzu). By now I've memorized half of the gismus, from {z****}
> to {n****}, except their rafsis; I still need dictionaries. Since most of my
> Lojban readings happen on Firefox, I find it would be fantastically useful
> if the browser is added an extension specialized for direct Lojban popup
> translation (rather than manually tabbing windows and searching for the word
> out from the list). Also it might be a nice introductory device for those
> Firefox users who have never put their toes in Lojban.
>
> I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how exactly programs of this kind are
> made or how dfficult production of them might be. At least they seem to be
> not unpopuplar (there are nearly 90 add-ons listed in the category "Language
> Support and Translation"). So, why not one nice Lojban popup dictionary for
> Firefox?

Well I'm not an expert in Add-Ons. But I guess it would
demand some serious work, even if you just wanted it to
work for Lojban-English translations. You would need to
provide a Lojban-English dictionary (probably in form
of a data base) to start with. I don't even know whether
such a dictionary/data base exists...

The gismu list I know of has a lot strange English
phrasings in it and would not be very helpful, I'm afraid.

Also, I don't know WHO could do the job. The existing
Add-Ons are probably provided by the FireFox company (if
this exists?). I doubt that they would bother about a
clear minority language such as Lojban.

Martin