translation links tranfree 7 translatortips.com helping translators do better business

tranfree issue 7 - 12 October 1999

An Amazing Collection of web links to translation and reference resources.

By Mary Maloof

Lions, tigers, and bears ... oh, my! When searching for information on the Internet, translators can get...

... lost in the jungle if they don't know where to look. Reference sites of interest to translators are multiplying exponentially - which means that while there are more sites that prove to be treasure troves of useful information, there are also more "snake pits" that promise much but deliver nothing, and waste our precious time when we're trying to meet a deadline.

That said, it's immensely helpful for us to compile lists of useful links as frequently as possible in the interest of helping one another avoid the "snake pits." In this article I will concentrate on reference sources that are useful to as wide a group of translators as possible, such as multilingual dictionaries, sites for international organizations, and general cultural and linguistic databases. I assume that most of you translate into or from English, so I will include many English-language resources as well.

It's a jungle out there ... but this list of tried-and-true favorites (and helpful newcomers) should aid you in hacking through it!

Dictionaries and Glossaries

http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~rvdstich/eugloss/welcome.html A multilingual glossary of medical terms.

http://www.bureaudelatraduction.gc.ca/pub.htm The website of the Translation Bureau of the Department of Public Works and Government Services of Canada offers a number of free French/English and French/English/Spanish glossaries.

gopher://info2.itu.ch:70/11/.1/Termite Trilingual telecommunications terminology gopher.

http://www.llp.fu-berlin.de/baum/hyperref.html Online English-language dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopediae, touching on everything from aikido to meteor astronomy.

http://www.notebook4u.com/glossary.htm More online English-language dictionaries and glossaries.

http://www.cnie.org/nle/AgGlossary/AgGlossary.htm English-language dictionary of agricultural terms, compiled by the Congressional Research Service of the United States.

http://www.mtnds.com/af/ English-language acronym finder. Over 106,700 acronyms and abbreviations from various fields.

http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/ Dictionary of military terms and acronyms, compiled by the United States Department of Defense.

http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/dougb/rhyme-doc.html The Semantic Rhyming Dictionary. A boon to the literary translator who translates into English.

Basic Reference

http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/dougb/ident-doc.html More fun than useful, but I couldn't resist including this one. The Stochastic Language Identifier determines the language of a word or phrase of your choice.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ Very useful when you're doing technical translations and your client can't furnish you with pictures or explanatory materials.

http://www.pci.com.ar/glosario/monedas.htm List of national currencies, arranged by country.

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue.html The Ethnologue includes a Language Family Index, a Language Name Index, abbreviations, information on geographic distribution, 112 language maps, and 241 overviews of language situations by country.

http://www.emulateme.com/ E-Conflict World Encyclopedia. Includes maps, flags, geography, and even national anthems.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html The U.S. Library of Congress' series of country studies.

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's 1999 World Factbook.

http://www.georgetown.edu/pdba/ Georgetown University Political Database of the Americas

http://www.latinworld.com/ LatinWorld - A search engine/browser for Latin America and the Caribbean.

http://lanic.utexas.edu/ Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC)

Links Lists

http://www.towerofbabel.com/linkslibrary/ Tower of Babel's library of links to resources in the arts.

http://www.accurapid.com/journal/links.htm A very broad assortment of useful resources for translators.

http://www.rahul.net/lai/companion.html The Translator's Home Companion

http://alabanza.com/kabacoff/Inter-Links/ Inter-Links, an Internet resource locator and navigator. Access to thousands of libraries as well as a generous number of dictionaries and reference sources.

http://www.speakeasy.org/~dbrick/Hot/foreign.html Links to dictionaries and other resources in many different languages and countries.

International Organizations

http://www.iadb.org/ The Inter-American Development Bank

http://www.imf.org/ The International Monetary Fund

http://www.un.org/ The United Nations

http://www.worldbank.org/ The World Bank Group

Terminology Resources

http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/itarch/
home/research.html Resources for translators of archaeological texts.

http://eserver.org/ Carnegie-Mellon University's Eserver, which has vast holdings in the arts and humanities.

http://www.healthy.net/Library/Index.asp Resources for translators of medical texts.

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/www/ Foreign trade statistics, compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Mary C. Maloof, owner of Maloof Language Services, Inc., is a freelance Spanish/French to English translator and language services broker. She also directs a worldwide network of translators and interpreters called The American Web for International Languages (AWIL). For further information, go to http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/
mmaloof/index.htm

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