Most of our dear colleagues have used Linguee for years, and it's a great tool. We always make sure to emphasize to our lovely students that Linguee is not to be used as a substitute for high-level dictionaries, but rather a complementary tool. There are some very powerful web tools that make translators' lives better, and Linguee is one of them (and one of the best, too, the other being the terminology databank IATE).
If you are not yet familiar with Linguee, it's essentially a web tool that searches published translations for the term that you are looking for. There's no guarantee that what you find has been translated correctly and there is no review of the results, but you get to see the terms translated by others, complete with a link and a source, and you see the term(s) in context, which is highly useful. It's an invaluable research tool, and oftentimes, the results are from very high-level sites, such as publications from the European Union and the United Nations. Linguee is available in many languages. It's particularly useful for partial phrases. To test it, try it with something like "court is now adjourned."
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| Image courtesy of Linguee. |
A few days ago, we heard from our friends at Linguee who told us about their most recent launch, which took place on February 9th and which featured some upgrades to make it even better. Here's what they had to say:
Linguee is a multilingual online dictionary and search engine
for translations, available in more than 200 language combinations.
Our search engine offers access to over one billion translated
texts and has answered more than 4 billion queries so
far, helping 25 million different people in November
2014 alone.
The upcoming launch will take place on the Monday
9th February and will debut Linguee's groundbreaking
autocompletion and autocorrection technology (not the ordinary run-of-the-mill
autocompletion - Linguee doesn't just show the word you're looking for before
you finish typing but also the translations). Thanks to this new technology
users are now provided with the requested translation after typing in just
the first few letters of the word.
Other significant developments include drastically
improved content, an enhanced audio pronunciation feature and a brand new
dynamic mobile version. During the last year, Linguee collaborated with
over 400 professional translators, lexicographers and linguists in order
to provide users with the best possible content available on the web.
2 comments:
I just recently stumbled upon Linguee via a poll on ProZ.com, where users could vote on their favorite tool. And yes, it's a great tool! I've seen some very heavy technical articles in there, which have helped me out in the automotive field.
The autocompletion is great - although I don't see the target text at the same time. Is that in a paid version or something?...
@Thomas W.: Thanks for reading and for commenting. Happy to hear that you like Linguee as much as we do! We are not sure what is up with not being able to see the target text at the same time. Be sure to ping the Linguee folks, as I bet they have an easy answer/solution.
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