I recently came across a new web-based tool for translators working with German and English: Linguee.
As you know, professional translators are not supposed to rely on bilingual dictionaries, because no matter how good they may be, they’re never perfect. Back at university, my professors told us incessantly always to use parallel texts (i.e., in the source and target languages) as our primary research resources.
This is why I usually go on Google, enter the term or expression I’m looking for, followed by “English” (or “Deutsch”, as the case may be), and then scour the search results for websites that are available in both English and German to find comparative material.
Of course, this method can be time-consuming. Sometimes, or, indeed, very often, such searches will capture websites that merely offer a Google machine translation into other languages, instead of an actual translation. So, you have to browse through the results and weed out those “duds”.
Quite often, too, websites that do provide authentic versions in various languages take a shortcut and tend to provide only bare-bones summaries in other languages. In other words, the page that contains the term you’re trying to research may not exist at all in the other language.
It can therefore take quite a while before you find the one site that delivers its information and content in a truly bilingual package (i.e., with a complete translation provided by human translators, rather than by machine translation).
Thanks to the new website Linguee, I’ve been able to do without that time-consuming “Googling”. Enter any term or phrase, and Linguee will throw up a split screen (German/English) of parallel texts, with the term or phrase in bold, so that the user can locate it more easily and faster.
Granted, some of the results are total nonsense, but the site does put up a warning sign in such cases, which is a helpful time-saver.
Here’s more on Linguee:
What is Linguee?
With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts in English and German for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.What is the benefit?
When you translate texts to a foreign language, you usually look for common phrases rather than translations of single words. With its intelligent search and the significantly larger amount of stored text content, Linguee is the right tool for this task. You find:
- In what context a translation is used
- How frequent a particular translation is
- Example sentences: How have other people translated an expression?
By searching not only for a single word, but for a respective word in its context, you can easily find a translation that fits optimal in context. With its large number of entries, Linguee often retrieves translations of rare terms that you don't find anywhere else.
The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about a service like that for the longest time. But since I don’t know anything about programming and creating such a site and search engine, building a site like that myself was never an option.
The brains behind Linguee are:
Linguee was founded by Gereon Frahling and Leonard Fink. CEO Gereon Frahling came up with the idea in autumn of 2007 after being a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Google Inc. in New York.
The site itself is still in its beta version, and hasn’t been live for very long. But I’ve been using it now for almost a week, and I have to say, chapeau! Well done, indeed.
I hope in future Linguee will be available in other language pairs as well (e.g., French/English, etc.).
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