Re: Dictionary to translate

[Gudmund Areskoug <fta algonet se>]

Hi,

Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2003-12-12 klockan 07.15 skrev Tomas Kuliavas:
> 
>>>As for licensing, words and their translations cannot be licensed or
>>>copyrighted, because they're part of common knowledge, at least in a
>>>majority of places (they can be trademarked for use in constrained
>>>fields, like IT, but only if they're not common words at the same
>>>time).
>>
>>I am not the lawyer, but I think you can copyright wordlist.
---snip---
> A word list can probably also be considered "a piece of work" if it's
> also large enough and non-trivial enough. Personal influence by whomever
> created it can perhaps be shown in the selection of what words are
> listed if the selection is non-trivial, and also their descriptions if
> those descriptions are non-trivial enough. But the bar for what word
> list is copyrightable is probably set much higher than for an ordinary
> text of the same length, since it's probably more difficult to prove
> that it has been personally influenced.

I can confirm that this is so. There were many rather lengthy 
discussions about these matters amongst professional translators a 
few years ago, stemming from the fact that translation memories were 
getting more prolific, and some considered selling or freely sharing 
their TM's.

Strings of text, and even terms that can not be considered "common" 
may well be covered by copyright. The real "fun" starts in the 
conflict between the translators automatic default copyright to the 
translation and the buyers rights to the goods they've paid for, but 
  luckily, most of that is OT here :).

So: the keywords are "common" and "reasonable".

Then there are rules for compiled works and citations, that states a 
guideline for how much of a piece of work may be copied into or 
reused in a new piece of work, and still have the new piece be 
considered "original". Can't remember the exact percentages.

So if you make an "original" enough dictionary compilation using 
"reasonably common" terms and strings, you should be fine.

BR,
Gudmund