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External resources

External resources recommended by our translators/editors

Multilingual

  • Wikipedia – Tori says: “I find Wikipedia can be very useful for technical terms in the various languages and also for going between languages by clicking on “in other languages” where equivalents exist (bearing in mind of course that the texts in different languages are not translations of each other but that this can be a way of getting to the right terminology nonetheless)”.
  • WordReference.com – Tori says: “it’s is an online English, French, Italian and Spanish Dictionary with language forums (these are particularly useful for unusual words or phrases as you can check back through previous questions and answers from translators)”. Sara says: “What I love about the word reference is having it in the firefox search box. I have one set up for Sp>En and another En>Sp – presumably you can do that for French too. The link to load it is conveniently at the bottom of every wordref page. I have NOT been at all impressed with the wordref discussion forums at the bottom of most entries though. As huge a grain of salt as you need when looking over proz options, you have to use a barrel for these”.
  • Proz – Sara: “I use proz all the all the time and think its amazing to have that sort of community. You know, though, that the founder, Henry, is a total right-winger? I put up a pro-bono job announcement looking for volunteer interns and translators for the vigil to shut down the School of the Americas last year and it got shut down by him within an hour and I was banned from posting. The inspiring thing is that we got a good bunch of volunteers in that time- and after I was banned a bunch of colleagues told me that this was a classic Henry move. It does color the site in lots of invisible ways I think”.
  • IATE – Inter Active Terminology for Europe – The EU inter-institutional terminology database system. IATE has been used in the EU institutions and agencies since summer 2004 for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology.
  • “Tools for translators“http://www.gotranslators.com/Public/ConsultEN.php – dictionaries, lexicons, glossaries etc.
  • Conjugations of English and French verbs
  • From Language to Language multilingual dictionary
  • iLoveLanguages – a comprehensive catalog of language-related internet resources

English

  • Answers.com – “Online dictionary, encyclopedia and much more”. With the following options: dictionary, antonyms, legal, wordnet, wikipedia, translations.
  • Thefreedictionary.com – Patricia says: “I find it very useful to get the precise meaning of English terms. It includes a thesaurus and various specialized dictionaries”.
  • Dictionary.com (various reference resources for English and links to many more as well as lists of other language dictionaries available online)

Spanish

French

  • Le Grand Dictionnaire – Frédéric says: I use Le Grand Dictionnaire, published by l’Office québécois de la langue française as a reference dictionnary and glossary for most technology terms. They have, I find, the most comprehensive and most up-to-date equivalents of the latest English technology terms.
  • Règles de typographie française applicables à l‘écriture d’articles, de comptes rendus de réunions, de projets, de messages électroniques ou de pages HTML. Recommended by Gisèle.
  • Règles de ponctuation et de typographie. – Recommended by Gisèle.
  • Règles de typographie française [Source: Framasoft] – Aslo recommended by Gisèle.