Snara has now had a makeover and is even more accessible. Just over a year ago, Miðeind acquired Snara, and since then a great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes to get the data into a suitable format and improve the user experience.
Snara contains 43 valuable dictionaries and other reference works which are important to preserve and make user-friendly. Digital dictionaries offer great possibilities that traditional dictionaries do not, for example due to lack of space. Unlike printed dictionaries, a website is not limited by page count, so entries are given more space and can be easier to read. In order to take advantage of digital dictionaries, we have converted the data into a format that is more flexible than the previous one and enables us to present information in new ways. Alongside that work, various books have been corrected, improved or updated.
In addition to the collections that have been available on Snara, we have added two new ones: Miðeind's Synonyms (Samheiti Miðeindar), a thesaurus compiled using automated methods which includes, among other things, vocabulary not found in the Icelandic Thesaurus (Íslensk samheitaorðabók), and Ensk.is, a free and open English-Icelandic dictionary compiled by Sveinbjörn Þórðarson. In addition, we once again include collections that were previously available on Snara but have not been a part of Snara on Málstaður until now. These are the English-English WordNet and concordances, which allow users to look up words and see the context in which each of them appears. The concordances can be used to search the works of Halldór Laxness and the Icelandic Sagas. Finally, we have also updated the Termbase for information technology and computing (Tölvuorðasafnið), which belongs to the Term Bank (Íðorðabankinn). A more detailed description of each dictionary or collection can be found on Málstaður.
While converting the data to a different format, our guiding principle has been to standardise both individual entries and entries across collections, so that a user who is used to looking things up in one collection can easily turn to others. The layout and appearance of entries have therefore been standardised as far as possible, and elements within entries, e.g. definitions or examples, are displayed in the same way. Below are examples from two dictionaries, the German-Icelandic and the Danish-Icelandic, which previously had different layouts that have now been standardised.
The user experience in Snara has been greatly enhanced, and we now take advantage of various possibilities that digital dictionaries offer. Tooltip text, which appears when the mouse hovers over various abbreviations, has been added to make information clearer. The text is available for grammatical information, text types, usage fields and more, and appears in both the foreign language and Icelandic where applicable. Below is an example from the Spanish-Icelandic Dictionary.
In digital dictionaries, references between entries can also be made clearer, and we have now added a small window that opens when a cross-reference is clicked. This allows the user to easily view another entry without having to open it in full. Here we see an example from the Icelandic-English Dictionary.
Synonyms and antonyms now appear in separate fields to the right of the search results in Snara. The fields also appear in the sidebar in Málfríður, making it much easier to use varied vocabulary in texts. Synonyms and antonyms are shown for Icelandic and are obtained from all selected dictionaries that contain synonyms or antonyms. Below we see an example of Icelandic synonyms for the word 'drífa' when all Icelandic dictionaries are selected.
We have also added more configurations for the search in Snara to make it easier for users to find the right entries. You can choose whether to search only for headwords or for definitions as well. Pattern search is more accessible, so that you only need to fill in the fields 'Starts with', 'Contains', 'Ends with' and 'Number of letters' instead of typing wildcard characters. Here we see how pattern search is defined.
Snara's dictionaries are now used in other Málstaður products, not only for synonyms and antonyms in Málfríður but also for translations in Erlendur when a translation of a single word is requested. By default, Snara's dictionaries are searched for the translation of the word, but users can also request machine translation, as shown in the image below.
Following on from this work, we want to continue improving Snara, e.g. by updating entries that have become outdated or correcting things we have overlooked. We welcome all feedback from users, which can now be sent via the feedback option on individual entries in Snara or to [email protected]. You can follow us here on our website, on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
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