06 April 2009

A Different Kind of Wörterbuch

Linguee seems to offer an interesting twist on a boring area - bilingual dictionaries:

With Linguee, you can search for words and expressions in many millions of bilingual texts in English and German. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.

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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.

There two other points of interest. The source of the texts:

Our most important source is the bilingual web. Other valuable sources include EU documents and patent specifications.

And the fact that a "GPL version of the Linguee dictionary" is available.

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