Tuesday 4 January 2011

Multilingual UDC Summary update - 40 languages to date

UDC Summary (udcS) translations continue with great intensity, using our online, web-based tool and multilingual spreadsheets for offline work. We now have 40 languages online in over 10 different scripts: Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

We expect the top classes in Irish, Punjabi and Vietnamese shortly and we are reaching out to other colleagues interested in collaboration. There are over 100 volunteers, librarians, library school lecturers and researchers currently working on translations in their national language. Database statistics showing the translation progress can be viewed at the translation statistics page. Acknowledgments to contributors are currently noted in a translation tracking table.

There seems to be great interest in using the online schedules even in this present form. Average access to the website in March was over 22,000 hits per day.

Because of the intensity of the translation activity, and in order not to lose momentum, we devoted all of 2010 to encouraging, acquiring, uploading and supporting translations, improving the online translation interface and export tools. You can view a more detailed report in the Extensions & Correction, 31(2009). We are now in the process of designing our web content management system (Drupal) to support management and access to downloading exports, mappings and various useful content we will attach to udcS. Our plan for providing data dumps for download, various kinds of exports, and for publishing udcS as linked data is scheduled for 2011. We have created an alphabetical index of around 10,000 terms in English and we are now looking at creating an interface to this. Both mappings to other systems and natural language access will be our focus in the following months.

Report on the ongoing translation in Italian was provided by Chiara Zara at the ISKO Italy meeting in Venice (1 April 2011) "Il progetto di traduzione multilingue online della CDU".