turktrans blog

I have an ambition to launch online specialized dictionaries and/or glossaries, or more correctly, to collect such dictionaries “under one roof.” To this end, I launched a site with a suitable domain name (termbank). Now, I launched my first dictionary online: I uploaded a great part of my English Turkish Dictionary of Psychology originally published by Bilim ve Sanat Yayınları, Ankara in 2000. It has 3 reprints since then, and I guess that it will be reprinted for the 4th time in 2007. With more than 9,000 entries, it is the most comprehensive Psychology dictionary currently available in Turkey.

And, with some 5,000 entries, the online version of my English Turkish Dictionary of Psychology is one of the largest online dictionaries on Psychology on the net. I am planning to add another 3,000 entries until a new edition is published as a paperback.

I also added a lookup option for remotely querying the dictionary. By adding  a few lines of lookup code on their pages, webmasters can offer dictionary lookup to their own visitors. The search box functions in both languages, i.e., users can search both in English and Turkish (definitions are only in Turkish). I am also planning to include an option for user contributions whereby users can contribute terms/definitions to the dictionary, or suggest improvements/corrections.

I hope that visitors will find my online dictionary useful.

If you have a blog with a decent PR, your blog is exposed to a specific kind of automated link spam attack called commentspam. A botlike program crawls the web, identifies the blogs, and tries to post comments to each and every message it finds with backlinks to the spammer’s site. And this is what I am experiencing recently.

By default, I turned the comments option off as a guard against comment spamming. Nevertheless, and to my disappointment, Wordpress (at least Version 1.5) is unable to defend itself against comment spamming even if the comments option is turned off. My blog receives some 50 comment spams a day on the average. All are related to some credit card, mortgage, casino, travel or pharmacy sites selling viagra or similar drugs.

Thanks to God they are not published automatically, as I checked the “moderation required” option to moderate any comments. But I need to check my blog once in a while to delete all the comments posted so as to prevent the blog database from swelling too much.

I recently read a post in Google’s blogpost on comment spam again. It recommends using “nofollow” attribute for links in comments to fight against comment spam. But it is of no avail in many cases. It only tells the search engine(s) that you do not vouch for the link, that the link is “worthless” to visit. It does not prevent the spammer from stuffing your page with keywords that are in no way related to your site or the topic of your page. The only way is to ban such comments alltogether.

Perhaps it is time to upgrade my wordpress. I will check if the Wordpress 2 has a way to prevent such automatic posting of comments.

I added a universal unit converter to the tools section of turktrans. It converts almost anything and is capable of converting almost any unit in the following fields: Length, area, volume mass, weight, force, energy, pressure, temperature, velocity and time. The code is written by someone else, but I am planning to expand its functionality to include computing units (bits & bytes). It can prove to be very useful in localization projects involving conversions from one system of units into another.

Welcome to TurkTrans blog!
This blog aims at furnishing up-to-date informing to my valuable visitors about my availability for English Turkish translation projects. Also, I will update this page to include any major English Turkish or Turkish English project that I am currently working on.