Multitran

Multitran
Developer(s) Andrey Pominov
Stable release 3.44 / ?
Preview release ? / 22 April 2008
Written in C++
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Russian / English shell
Type Dictionary
License Proprietary; fair use; others
Website http://www.multitran.ru/

Multitran is an editable Russian multilingual online dictionary launched on 1 April 2001. The English–Russian–English dictionary contains over four million entries, while the total database has about eight million entries.[1] The dictionary has a function for reporting translation errors for registered users.

Features

Languages

Multitran includes the following online dictionaries:

The following dictionaries are to be offered soon:

History

The developer of the Multitran software is Andrey Pominov, Moscow.

Currently, Multitran is one of the largest and most popular web dictionaries in Russia.[2] Every day, over 90 thousand people visit Multitran.ru, and over 1.5 million search requests are processed.

The Multitran base was created by scanning a wealth of paper dictionaries and combining all the translations in one database.[3]

The website historically had a very low budget: according to Multitran's history page, a CPU paid only one dollar served over 4 million hits, and the site had issues with networking and electricity works around the webmaster's house in 2001 and 2002, as well as with growing traffic in 2002–3.[4]

Multitran users arrange offline meetings from time to time, so called 'pow-wows'. Such pow-wows were held in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev.

Copyright

The Multitran software is proprietary and closed-source.

The website content was copied from hundreds copyrighted sources, the majority of which were published after 1970.[3] It's not known how this can respect copyright laws: the website doesn't state whether a license was acquired from the copyright owners, nor whether the sources were determined to be in the public domain.

Contributions by users are in unknown copyright status.

Advantages and disadvantages of Multitran

The huge volume of the base is both an advantage and a disadvantage because:

References

  1. "Скачать словарь". Multitran. Retrieved 16 Sep 2014.
  2. 81st most visited site according to Alexa. The Russian Wiktionary has a better global rank, but lower rank in Russia, according to Alexa.
  3. 1 2 http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?a=146
  4. http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?p=7&a=5&s=history/Multitran.htm

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, November 12, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.