Translation and Idiom — the Advice of Strangers

We’ve talked a whole lot on Slaw over the years about translation, as befits a law blog in a country rich with immigration and with two official languages:

[related-posts]

And while the computer translation services such as Google Translate are miracles, they don’t always get it right — and sometimes get it comically wrong. A couple of the tough nuts in translation are idiom and professional jargon. A new online service, Linguee, may help here. Linguee, as it says, uses “the web as a dictionary,” allowing you to search for a word or a phrase and find its equivalent in one of five European languages. Importantly, the word or phrase is shown in a context, so you can evaluate its appropriateness for your purpose. As well, the source is given so you have a further check on suitability.

The service crawls the web looking for sentences from bilingual websites and EU documents that act as Rosetta stones, finding by its estimates a trillion such sentences. These are winnowed according to various rules derived from experience, leaving a whopping 100 million sentences in its database.

When you see the results of a translation, you’re invited to give a thumbs up or down to the result, explaining why you felt an expression was mistranslated if it was.