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Linguee - a very useful tool | ||
Tags: Dictionaries | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6306 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 7 26 March 2012 at 8:18am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure if this has already been discussed but I found an amazing tool for learning
languages and looking up words and phrases. It's a two way dictionary that uses human translated texts to form a large corpus of example sentences and their translations. It uses professionally translated websites and other sources such as documents translated by the European Union. I've been having a great time with it. You can type in single words or phrases. If you want to see many examples of how a word or phrase is translated or what it means, you can read through plenty of real world example sentences. It's wonderful. So far they have French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English but they are going to add Japanese and Mandarin. The algorithm they use also learns to filters out bad translation and bad sources over time. Very exciting. Text link to Linguee 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5466 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 26 March 2012 at 1:31pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for posting this link! I've recently been using Linguee to look up odd
expressions in context. I love the way that I can quickly see 20 or 30 uses of an expression, and it's great for making SRS cards. It's also great for those rare and difficult-to-translate idioms that don't appear on wordreference.com or other online sites. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5196 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 7 26 March 2012 at 2:27pm | IP Logged |
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This is so much better for me in Portuguese than the Compara site. Thanks!
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| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4799 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 7 26 March 2012 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks. It looks interesting. It still wasn't able to find a Spanish word I've been puzzling over: incompartido (incompartidas in context).
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| pingvin10 Groupie Hungary Joined 6212 days ago 68 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Hungarian* Studies: English, German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 5 of 7 26 March 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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I prefer GLOSBE with much more language pairs but Linguee is also a good one.
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 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5143 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 27 March 2012 at 7:39am | IP Logged |
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zerothinking, Amazing and exciting indeed. Thanks for posting it.
I tried a few searches (including the sample phrase "in his role as") in both Glosbe and Linguee, and found Linguee more useful for me: -Linguee's "editorial dictionary" on the left offered word by word translations. The contextual section on the right highlights (if possible) the words/phrase in both English and French versions. Glosbe highlights the words you've entered, but not their other-language counterparts. -Linguee gives the specific URLs for both English and French versions*. Glosbe had a link marked (for example) "Data source: Hansard", but didn't actually take you to the Hansard, nor even tell you that it was the Canadian Hansard. For a different search, it gave the home page URL for the source text (Open Subtitles), but not the specific page. -Linguee seems to be better than Glosbe in keeping phrases as a unit. *One additional benefit: the sources to which Linguee links could themselves provide a rich trove of other bilingual articles. Some of them may be a bit dry or specialist; others already well known (e.g. reports from UN organizations); but there are still more NGOs (non-governmental organizations), cultural bodies, environmental groups, company reports, etc., than one could possibly imagine; all just waiting to be discovered. Just type in your topic of choice, whether it be "save the whales", "oil sands project", or whatever... Of course, the range of languages in Glosbe is considerably wider; and I can certainly see it being much more useful for some of the polyglots on these forums for that reason. But my linguistic needs, such as they are (Eng/Fre), are simple. Edited by songlines on 27 March 2012 at 8:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 7 27 March 2012 at 11:00am | IP Logged |
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I have seen other digital dictionaries with parallel quotes, but Lingee has a nice clean setup which works extremely well for compound words and expressions, and I do hope they will add more languages later. But if you look closely enough you will of course discover that there are cases where one of the two versions isn't quite top notch. For instance I wondered how a system based on parallel texts from official sources like the EU and other official organizations would deal with foul language, and it was surprisingly cooperative - but I did notice for instance the following quote, which looks every bit like a machine translation from German to English:
[...] IV. a Wasserklo live, that one in the country yet saw, do not make nevertheless nothing, if we get fireworks from above now. 80% of the population go still on a Plumpsklo in the garden and the shit seeped there, in the most favorable case or raus into the ditch are led. And a page or so further down I saw this hilarious spelling error in German: "Die Applikation erlaubt es dem Nutzer mit ihrer mobile Kamera Bilder zu scheissen," My mind will be troubled by disturbing imagery for the rest of the day... Edited by Iversen on 27 March 2012 at 11:06am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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