KDE-Forum.org

This is a feature suggestion for web browsing, word processing, and other language related applications.

A button or menu selection allows the user to quickly and conveniently toggle dictionary and translation features. Suppose, for example, the dictionary feature is turned on. When you mouse over the word "car" in an HTML page, a pop-up display is triggered. The pop-up displays a picture of a car, the definition of the word "car", and a link you can click to hear the pronunciation of the word "car". Better yet, several pictures of typical cars are displayed in order to give the user an idea of the scope of things referred to by the word "car".

Many abstract concepts could be represented with pictures as well. The word "tall", for example, could be represented by two pictures. The first picture shows a tall person, and has a big green checkmark beneath it. The second picture depicts a short person, and has a big red "X" beneath it. Again, you could use several pictures to drive the point home, and to give the user some idea of the scope of things referred to by the word "tall". You could display a tall building and a short building, a tall vertical line and a short vertical line, etc. The user gets an idea of the meaning of the word by comparing a pair of pictures, and noting which picture DOESN'T represent the concept (the one with the red "X" beneath it), as well as which picture DOES represent the concept (the one with the green checkmark beneath it). Even if the user doesn't understand these symbols, and needs to read the word definition, the pictures could help the reader retain that information, and could help bring the information alive and make it more interesting. (Imagine, for example, using pictures with colorful and expressive Warner Brothers cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam!)

I’m a U.S. citizen. I once worked for a U.S. corporation with a German subsidiary. Many of the German employees spoke English well enough to surf English language web sites, but frequently encountered words they didn’t remember or hadn’t learned yet. They didn’t need specialized language training (basically, they already knew English), but they could have derived considerable benefit from a convenient, automatic translation or dictionary feature for enhancing their web browsing experience.