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Linguee

http://www.linguee.com

I've just come across the brilliant dictionary and translation/search engine site Linguee. This is a major addition to the tools available to teachers, students and translators. It comes from a team in Germany and could be serious competition for Wordreference. You can search individual words or whole phrases and idiomatic expressions and it will use its search engine to find the translations in real contexts, something Wordreference does not do. I would need to spend longer with it to see how useful it is in everyday use, but first impressions are very good.

They say:

Linguee is a unique translation tool combining an editorial dictionary and a search engine with which you can search through hundreds of millions of bilingual texts for words and expressions.

The Linguee search results are divided into two sections. On the left hand side you will see results from our reliable editorial dictionary. The results are displayed clearly and offer you a quick overview of the translation options. On the right hand side, you will find example sentences from other sources to provide you with an impression of how your search expression has been translated in context.

Compared to traditional online dictionaries, Linguee contains about 1,000 times more translated texts, which are displayed in full sentences. , Linguee will show translations for expressions such as "strong evidence", "strong relationship" or "strong opinion", and even for rare expressions or specific technical terms.

The young editors are at pains to say that it is not an internet translator. They add:

The vocabulary you see on the left hand side has been checked by our editors and is constantly enhanced manually.

The majority of the example sentences you see on the right hand side is from the bilingual web, particularly from professionally translated websites of companies, organizations, and universities. Other valuable sources include EU documents and patent specifications.
A specialised computer program, a web crawler, automatically searches the internet for multiple language webpages. These pages are detected automatically, and the translated sentences and words are extracted. The texts are then evaluated by a machine-learning algorithm which filters out the high quality translations for display. This system is capable of autonomously learning new quality criteria from user feedback to tell good translations from bad ones. It has found out, for instance, that a page is usually machine translated if it contains the word "Wordpress" while many words are literally translated. Through this training process, our algorithm is continuously learning to find thousands of such correlations and reliably extract the best translations autonomously. Our computers have already compared more than a trillion sentences. At the end of the day, only the top 0.01 per cent, i.e. 100 million of the translated sentences, are retained.

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