Translating Idioms

It was just not long ago when I needed to translate quite an idiomatic text from Russian into English. My old friend Multitran is normally helpful in such cases, but it was nice to discover WikIdioms project. I learned about it from the recent issue of Multilingual magazine (fortunately or not, it was the most interesting post in this issue for me).

As far as I can guess, the project was started not long ago and uses Drupal site engine which is very sofisticated and powerful, but sometimes really strange. I tried to use search to find a Russian idiom, and the first thing I found out was that Enter key does not work in Search field. You necessarily need to click Search button to start search - at least in my poor IE8. Then I found out that its search algorithm is not easy to understand. I tried different popular Russian words, and it found nothing though I knew for sure that there are idioms containing these words in the database. I ended up searching for a simple word "а". Try to guess what was found?

Search results
◦ние за волкот, а волкот на врата
◦Сидеть с помытой шеей
◦Сидеть с помытой шеей

I have no idea why the last entry is listed twice, and what is much more important, I have no idea where is а in this last entry.

Anyway, I do hope the project is going to eveolve and become a nice and useful dictionary. At least I'm going to use it both for work and for learning other languages idioms, and I do hope to contribute, too.