Reverse dictionary / dictionary index / two-way bilingual dictionary

Does WeSay have any features to hep in the creation of a two-way bilingual dictionary, e.g. English→ML & ML→English (where ML means minority language)?

Here’s a couple of things that might help:

  1. I have seen printed dictionaries, e.g. a Polish→English one, where there was an index in the back where you could look up a word in English and it would list all the Polish headwords that had that English word in the translation. Is there a tool that will do that?

  2. If you’ve completed a ML→English dictionary, is there a tool that will reverse the translation direction so as to at least give you a start in creating an English→ML dictionary?

I believe what you’re looking for is a Reversal Index, and this is not a feature that WeSay has, but fortunately FLEx has this feature along with a lot of other ones as well.

Hi David,
WeSay doesn’t have tools to do those things. It’s great for gathering the data, but then to do advanced tasks like this you should open your WeSay (LIFT) dictionary in FLEx, as Chris mentions do a Reversal.

Thanks for the clarification.

I noticed somebody in this community asking about switching the translation order, i.e. they wanted to use WeSay to collect English→ML data.

Does it ever make much sense in practice to use WeSay like that? As you say, it’s a data-gathering tool, and you’re going to miss culture-specific terms if you do your collection by trying to translate a list of the 5000 most common English words.