Translation is a labor-intensive process that involves significant efforts, covering a multitude of topics, requiring extensive research and contextual knowledge. Fortunately, the digital revolution triggered the creation of a lot of free tools and resources that help speed up the workflow, increase the productivity, and improve the accuracy of translations. Today’s post will be based on some multilingual dictionaries and databases that are available online and which are widely used and recommended by translators.
Multilingual Dictionaries
Linguee is a powerful resource that combines a dictionary with a search engine. It has several language pairs available to be selected. Linguee provides possible equivalents for the word or sentence searched, as well as several contextual excerpts in both languages.
WordReference is one of the largest multilingual dictionaries on the web. It has a forum to discuss and ask questions about translation and languages. It also provides grammar rules and verb conjugations in several languages.
The Free Dictionary is available in multiple languages too. Besides its bilingual dictionaries, it also includes medical, financial, and legal dictionaries, as well as other relevant features such as a thesaurus, an encyclopedia, and an acronyms section.
Dicionarios.cc is very intuitive and easy to use. There you can type a word in 6 different languages, and it will search its definition through several monolingual dictionaries.
Multilingual Databases
IATE is the European Union’s database and its aim is to collect, disseminate and manage EU-specific terminology. IATE has entries in 25 languages, including Latin.
UNTERM is the United Nations terminology database. It has entries in the 6 UN’s official languages, as well as in German and Portuguese.
TERMIUM Plus is the terminology and linguistic data bank of the Government of Canada. It is quite comprehensive in the number of subject areas covered, but it really only covers French and English, some Spanish, and (even less) Portuguese terms.
WTOTERM is the World Trade Organization terminology database. It is available in English, French, and Spanish.
ProZ is the most commonly known portal and network for translators, perfect for crowdsourcing. It provides a database that gathers translation dictionaries and glossaries, a forum to ask questions or join discussions, discounts on translation tools as well as other useful resources and features.
EUROSTAT provides statistics regarding Europe in English, French and German, allowing comparisons between countries and regions.
IMDb is a database that provides information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities. It is great to find original translations of movie titles and other relevant data.
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