Comments on: Foreign Language Translation of Chemical Nomenclature by Computer http://www.chemspider.com/blog/foreign-language-translation-of-chemical-nomenclature-by-computer.html Building Community for Chemists Fri, 24 May 2013 06:45:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 By: Tore Eriksson http://www.chemspider.com/blog/foreign-language-translation-of-chemical-nomenclature-by-computer.html/comment-page-1#comment-141871 Tore Eriksson Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:49:42 +0000 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=1198#comment-141871 Interesting article, but it could have been better if the author had a linguist check it as well. The “Historical influence” part contains statements like:

“It is interesting to observe that both Chinese and Japanese use the same word (character) for water, ‘水’, predating their divergence 3000 years ago.”

Since Chinese and Japanese are unrelated languages, and 水 is just a character, not a word, borrowed from Chinese (a long time ago, but not 3000 years), this sentence is wrong in multiple ways. I think the author doesn’t really acknowledge the amount of borrowings that exists among langauges, especially for scientific terms.

]]> By: Egon Willighagen http://www.chemspider.com/blog/foreign-language-translation-of-chemical-nomenclature-by-computer.html/comment-page-1#comment-141316 Egon Willighagen Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:18:39 +0000 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=1198#comment-141316 What has been annoying me for a very long time is the way chem DB systems deal translations. When the paper was out just shortly (thanx to RSS), I scanned over the text, and did not find a clear solution.

What a proper chem name translation should know is that:

“acetic acid”@en translates to “azijnzuur”@nl, and
“ethanoic acid”@en translates to “ethaanzuur”

Even though the both refer to the same compound. The ‘Woordenboek Organische Chemie’ did this (the data is available from sf.net/projects/woc), but was the only one to do the translations maintaining ethymology.

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