Linguee.com – Searching through millions of translations online

COLOGNE, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nowadays, anyone who wants to translate an item of vocabulary into Spanish, French, German or Portuguese consults an online dictionary. But how are you supposed to find the right translation for compound expressions such as “strong evidence”, “strong arms”, “strong relationship” or “strong opinion”? Phrases like this crop up in every text – and the limitations of the regular online dictionaries soon become apparent.

“Linguee is first and foremost a ‘technology’. It is therefore a natural step to extend this service to a global market”

But straightforward assistance is now on hand in the form of a new, free web service called Linguee.com which permits you to sift through enormous volumes of translated texts for words and word combinations. According to its operators, Linguee.com has access to around a thousand times more textual material translated by human linguists than any previous online dictionary.

As of today, this service is now available for the language pairs Spanish-English, French-English and Portuguese-English. The German-English version has already been well established for the past twelve months and handles more than 500,000 searches each day.

Novel approach: Finding terms within the context of whole sentences

The revolutionary feature of Linguee is that you search texts that have been produced by a human translator and posted on the internet. In this way, the user gets a broad yet detailed overview of how vocabulary is used in context. Linguee’s two founders, Gereon Frahling and Leonard Fink, have developed a technology that is currently unmatched. A web crawler is constantly analysing the internet, looking out for new multilingual pages. In this way, Linguee enables the user to track down extremely rare technical terminology.

Clear presentation: Items sensibly arranged and smart provision for extra information

The Linguee user can see from a pie chart how the translations on offer compare for frequency of usage. Examples of each term quoted in complete sentences show which translation is used in which context. Furthermore, the user can click on a source link and the relevant web page will open up showing the entire surrounding context.

Global reach: Covering the major world languages

The principle can be transferred to any language. “Linguee is first and foremost a ‘technology’. It is therefore a natural step to extend this service to a global market,” says Gereon Frahling. Other languages in the pipeline include Italian, Chinese, Arabic and Russian.