A newbie here, and I'm afraid I can't even see where I should post a general "can I do it?" question (with possibly a "how?" follow-up).

I'm pretty new to FileMaker - in fact I haven't really used it for about 15 years - and I'm wondering if I can use it to create a dictionary. I've a had a look through the manual but my question isn't obviously answered: if the answer's yes, I'll go back and have a more thorough read.

I want to create a language translation dictionary, which means that I will want to enter a word in language A and provide a selection of translations in language B. When I lookup the word in language A, I'll get the list of words in language B. Obviously. But it has to work the other way around, too, so that when I enter one of the words in language B, I'll get a selection of responses in language A including the original one from language A.

So

X -> A, B, C

Y -> B, C, D

Z -> C, G, H

A -> V, W, X

B -> W, X, Y

C -> X, Y, Z

And so on.

Can filemaker do this? Any keywords I should look up in the manual?

Thanks.

Sounds like a many-to-many relationship:

Language A --< Translations >-- Language B

Translations is a join table: it stores one record for each A to B link, usually with the primary key field of each A and B record. Using your example, Translations would have records like this:

XA

XB

XC

YB

YC

YC

etc

That way you can be sitting on a layout based on Language A or B and show a portal of all the related words from the other language.

I don't think the manual has much if anything to say about many-to-many relationships, so you might want to look at some of the FileMaker books out there. The Que "Special Edition" had a decent section on relationships IIRC.

Thanks for the reply. I'll have to have a closer look at FileMaker. I'm assuming you are saying that the fields will merge somehow, that if I search for X, I'll get A, B, C and not X-A, X-B and X-C. If the latter, then there's not much point using Filemaker, I could just use a straight WP and sort by paragraph...

Yes, you can search for X and return ABC. Or, the way I pictured it, you'd return X, but show A, B and C in a portal or something.

I was just trying to give you an idea of how you might structure the data. How you present it is a whole other challenge.