The Alternative Spanish Dictionary: A Review
One of the more interesting dictionary sites on the Internet
today is the Alternative Dictionaries Site. The name is a
little generic in terms of what the site contains but once you
get to the home page, you find out pretty quick what the purpose
of the site is.
As it states on the home page, the Alternative Dictionaries
collection is "bad language" that contains "slang, profanities,
insults and vulgarisms from all over the world." So from that
description alone you can be pretty sure that this isn't just
any old collection of language terms.
The site was created by and is under the editorial control of
Hans-Christian Holm. When I checked the site in January 2006,
the website listed a total of 162 separate language dictionaries
(everything from Apache to Zulu). These dictionaries together
contain 2743 terms along with their corresponding English
translation(s).
As with any other online dictionary reference, there are both
some positives and negatives about the site. I'll start out with
the negative (just to be able to end on a positive note).
The Bad
The site seems to have started out with very good intentions
collecting user-submitted words along with their definitions and
then posting them in the corresponding language dictionary.
However, it seems that now there is no way for users to add
updated terms. The FAQs promise an input method to be up and
running, but the last update to the page seems to have happened
a year and a half ago (June 2004), so I doubt that the input
system will be up any time soon. There is, however, an email
address on the site through which minor edits can be made, but I
don't know if the email address is good.
Along with there not being an input system is the fact that
slang changes rather quickly when compared to other types of
language. Because there is no input system, there is no way to
know how current the slang is that you're looking at. It might
have been used five years ago, but it could mean something
entirely different today. There is no way to know by just
looking at the dictionary entries.
Another negative is that there are only 2743 terms for 162
separate languages. That comes out to an average of only about
17 words per language, which is not all that extensive. However,
to be fair, the Alternative Spanish dictionary has just over 170
terms, while the Alternative Mexican Spanish section has a
little under 140 terms.
A final criticism is that because the dictionary seems to have
at one point been populated by user-submitted terms, there is
some duplication of words and their definitions.
Enough of that. Now...
The Good
First of all, because the dictionary only deals with "bad
language" the vocabulary is somewhat specialized (if you
consider profanity and vulgarity to be a specialized topic).
This is nice because you know exactly what kind of words and
definitions will be in the dictionary.
Second, the layout is easy to navigate. You choose the language
on the left-hand side of the homepage and after you get to the
language dictionary you want, you click on a word and it goes
right to a list of all the words in the dictionary (there can be
multiple pages if there are numerous terms).
Another positive is that each definition contains useful
information including the part of speech, the definition, and a
notes section with different information, such as the literal
meaning of the word, where the word is used, pronunciation, etc.
Finally, the editor has made .pdf documents available for each
language dictionary. You can either download each individual
dictionary or download all the dictionaries in one .pdf document
of 131 pages.
The Rating
Overall, I give the Alternative Dictionaries site 2 out of 5
stars, just because it seems to have been pushed aside and is no
longer maintained. However, I give the Alternative Spanish
Dictionary 3 out of 5 stars because there is a decent collection
of terms and definitions.