Web-based terminology databases are a wonderful thing for translators. As compared to the research tools of times gone by, we now have access to resources that are vast, free, and easily updated when new terms arrive on the scene. A few of my favorites are:
- Le Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique
- Inter Active Terminology for Europe (IATE)
- and the ProZ term search
Industry sources such as In Trans Books carry paper dictionaries that outperform online resources (at least the free ones!) when it comes to niche specializations, but it still sometimes feels as if paper dictionaries are inching into obsolescence. I recently attended a presentation by a financial translator who, when showing a photograph of his office, said, “I keep my paper dictionaries on the shelves because it looks good, but I can’t remember the last time I used one, I just search on line.”So, it’s good to be reminded that in the digital age, paper still wins out sometimes. I was recently translating a dating website (a post in itself!) and was stumped by the adjective “chialleux,” which did not appear in any of my usual online sources and also gets very few Google hits on French web pages. To the rescue: the 2-volume set of Harrap’s New Standard French and English Dictionary (original copyright 1934, one of the contributors was born in 1888), with the verb chialer (“to snivel”) and the corresponding noun chialeur/euse (“crybaby”).It seems that the important lesson here isn’t so much whether web-based or paper dictionaries are best, but that it’s important not to discount one or the other; feel free to contribute your own thoughts on your terminology research methods.
Actually the Harrap’s is available as a CD ROM, as is le Grand Robert/Collins, and you can do text string searches on the same exact text as the print versions. It’s infinitely faster than the paper dictionary, and not online. The only caveat is that backwards compatibility doesn’t pose a problem for the paper dictionary, but my CD ROM dictionaries (and now DVD ROM dictionaries) have worked in some cases since Windows 98 and even on Vista now, too. CD ROMs and DVD ROMs are much more useful in my opinion than either paper or Web resources.
(I laughed at the decorative dictionaries bit: I, too, have my 218 paper dictionaries arranged on nice bookshelves in my office, but haven’t used one for some time. 🙂 )
I think the distinction to make here is online versus offline dictionaries, since many of the paper dictionaries are available in CD form now.
I vastly prefer electronic dictionaries (online or offline) because searching is so much quicker. I can also quickly copy and paste terms into Google to see real-world usage, frequency, etc.
Some of the paid dictionaries are also online now, and they have the great advantage of continual updates.
Nevertheless, I still have a huge stack of dictionaries: monolingual/bilingual and general/specialist. I just use them increasingly rarely.
Thanks for the comments, MT and Ryan, and for pointing out a major gap in my post, that of electronic dictionaries. I haven’t delved into them too much since I have some Linux compatibility issues, but you are definitely right to bring the issue up! And it looks like it’s a consensus that paper dictionaries make nice eye candy for a translator’s wall!
Ha! I’m still using my beloved paper dictionaries. I do Norwegian, Swedish and Danish into English and often find that I don’t get a single hit on the Internet for a term I’m looking for (because of the small populations of the Scandinavian countries), let alone a bilingual hit that would give me the translation. The online dictionaries for these languages are few in number and of very limited use depending on the topic you’re dealing with. Paper dictionaries are usually the best there is for these language pairs, but even so the paper dictionaries are woefully inadequate sometimes. Sometimes downright laughable. One good thing is that my paper dictionaries are updated with important terms all the time (in pen in the margins). And they still work even when the power goes out!