more on flora and fauna and question about Multitran
nataliek at UALBERTA.CA
nataliek at UALBERTA.CA
Tue Sep 18 03:10:13 UTC 2007
I am a fan of Will Ryan's work and I agree with him that things can
get quite complex. When writing about folk medicine, I had the
advantage of having talked to village herbalists. Thus, I knew what
the various plants looked like, what their various uses were, how
their medicinal properties were activated, so to speak, etc. This
made it much easier to find English equivalents. In this regard, I
very much recommend the 2 volume "A Modern Herbal," which is actually
not modern at all but an old English source book republished by Dover.
I think this book is wonderful and I was able to find the English
equivalents of the various plants I was writing about in it. I was
pleased and charmed, for example, to discover that liubiistok is
called lovage in English.
Now about translating flora and fauna - I was quite excited when
someone suggested Multitran. But, when I tried it, I was quite
disappointed. Translations for the most obvious items came up, but
the more esoteric terms were just not part of the database. Has
anyone else tried Multitran and have others had better results?
Natalie Kononenko
Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography
University of Alberta
Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
200 Arts Building
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E6
Phone: 780-492-6810
Web: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/
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