Some helpful online resources for translators

If you are anything like me, you will continue to use paper dictionaries until the day you die. Don't get me wrong: I am a fully-paid up member of the Internet and Web 2.0 club, but when it comes to dictionaries or newspapers, I still prefer to do my browsing or reading in print.

Like most of us, I also have some of the most common dictionaries on CD-ROM and installed to my hard drive, yet I find I use them less and less often. Why? Because, and this is no exaggeration, I am much faster finding what I need in my old and trusty printed dictionaries than I would be using a CD-ROM dictionary.

Having said that, I have to admit that I use some dictionaries or similar resources available online. The following is not an exhaustive list, as it covers only a few of the resources useful to any translator working in the same language pairs as I do.

http://dictionary.reverso.net: This one gives you free access to the best bilingual dictionaries out there, Collins. As we all know, all bilingual dictionaries are seriously flawed, but in this group, no one does it better than Collins. This one is available for most of the common language pairs.

http://www.dict.cc: This wiki-dictionary for German/English is quite useful, as it covers a lot of technical terms from various subject areas. As of this moment, this database contains 662,243 translation pairs – not bad at all. Users add terms all the time, while others vet them and make any corrections as necessary. Dict.cc plans to upgrade to include additional languages in the future, so stay tuned.

http://dictionary.reference.com: This is an extremely useful and comprehensive online monolingual dictionary for English. It comes with the dictionary, a thesaurus, a reference database and, more recently, a translation feature. Forget the machine translation, though, and instead appreciate the fact that some English terms in the dictionary now also indicate the corresponding words in other languages.

http://www.wordreference.com: Also based on Collins, but with a slightly different twist. Look up a word in, say, French to English, and at the bottom of the entry you will find a list of links to the Word Reference message boards, where users ask for help with terms and translations. Most of the proposed translations, however, are provided by non-translators and therefore tend to be transliterations, rather than actual translations.

http://www.wikipedia.org: Everyone uses this site. It makes researching a subject matter in two or more languages relatively simple (as compared to the good old days). Not every entry, of course, has a corresponding page in the foreign-language version of Wikipedia that you may require, but you will find what you need about 95% of the time. Make sure to bookmark http://www.wiktionary.org as well while you are at it. And if you want to learn another language, you might perhaps find something helpful in Wikibooks, or consider enrolling at the Wikiversity.

http://www.granddictionnaire.com: Quite useful, as it may contain some terms you may not find anywhere else. It is an official Office québécois de la langue française site and project. It is similar to, and essentially a smaller version of, TERMIUM, the database established by the Canadian federal government, but unlike the federal database, it is free – naturally, as the Québec government grabs the tax dollars paid into the "equalization system" by Canadians from other parts of the country to provide generous services that other provinces cannot afford, because they have already sent their money to Ottawa, which then funnels it into Québec.

Comments

[Dondu N. Raghavan]

Thanks Werner for your feedback to my post.

Sometime back I tried to put your blog in my blog roll as I have done for the other blogs, to which I had earlier given link. But I was unsuccessful at that time and I got an error message saying that your blog does not have RSS feed or something to that effect.

I have been meaning to write to you about this but this got postponed time and again. Today I am pleasantly surprised by your feedback. I tried just once more to put your blog too in my blog roll and this time I succeeded! It is much better than the static link. Whenever you post a new topic, it gets reflected (albeit with a certain time lag of a couple of hours) in my blog roll, with the first two or three sentences. In that way I am able to keep myself updated with your postings.

Now that this blog roll is there, there is no longer any need to give the static link.

Regards,
Dondu N. Raghavan

[Werner Patels]

The odd thing is that feeds don't always work in all aggregators. I once heard it has something to do with the way dates are encoded. But, yes, the aggregator used by Blogger does make things a lot easier.