Rosettasaurus is a multilingual sentence wiktionary.
When people are translating between different languages,
most of the time they
are looking to communicate something through a phrase or sentence,
rather
than using an individual word.
Words by themselves often lack the context required to reliably bridge the mutilingual gap.
The goal of the Rosettasaurus is to offer an alternative
to a translation
dictionary by offering translations
at the sentence or phrase level,
instead of the word level.
Rosettasaurus also offers an alternative to services like Google Translate,
which use 'machine translation' to translate text.
These services guess
translations based on statistical methods
applied to web pages found on the
internet.
The goal of Rosettasaurus is to establish a community wiki site
within which
an authoritative 'human translation' can be maintained
for a large set of common
sentences and phrases.
A full audit trail of edits to translations is kept,
which can then be moderated by administrators and the larger community.