As a technical translator for technology-based documents, the concepts of most documents I translate didn’t even exist ten years ago, so a printed dictionary may already be out of date if I were to buy it for the ridiculously high prices that most of the best large dictionaries sell for nowadays…

So today I’m going to share several of my favourite free online dictionaries with you! Note that most of these are actually technical dictionaries (apart from Wordreference), so they may not be so useful for looking up basic words and would thus not suit beginner to intermediate learners. For legal, economic, medical, litherary, political, technological, financial, scientific, industrial etc. words, sometimes you need a more efficient solution than a general dictionary for finding the right translation.

If it’s a basic word, don’t forget my advice about using Google Image to see what it means without even needing a translation (presuming it’s not an abstract quality)! I’ve also discussed the use of online forums and special Google searches to clear any language doubts you may be having. However, if you need a good translation of a word in the right context and you don’t know it already, these are an excellent place to start!

Multilingual dictionaries

Most of these sites do not actually specialise in one language. Since they are mostly not even written by one company, but are open to the community for editing, they can be used for several languages. Don’t think of this as them “spreading themselves thin”, some of these have vast amounts of words in particular language combinations that would put several specialised large printed dictionaries to shame! Of course, you should always be a bit sceptical before committing to a translation, and try to confirm your translation on several dictionaries or online forums.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is already well known as the free online encyclopedia, but did you know that it is also an essential tool for many translators? If you look up an entry on Wikipedia (and some on Wiktionary), it is very likely that the page has a frame on the left indicating several translations for that entry in other languages. You can read those entries in the other language if you wish, but sometimes the title of the entry is all you need; especially once you have confirmed that the entry you originally came to is in the right context (e.g. there are two main ways of looking at the English word “nail”; what is at the end of your fingers, and what you hit with a hammer, each with very different translations).

Of course, you need to go to the particular Wikipedia for the source language of the term you are looking up, rather than necessarily the English version. Wikipedia has over 100,000 individual entries in each of the 28 top languages, which can make it a very useful dictionary indeed! Overall, it is available in over 200 languages, and you can see the list of them here.

Wordreference

Wordreference is my favourite dictionary for looking up simple words, concepts, expressions, and some grammatical doubts. I especially like it’s automatic suggestion as you type and it’s ability to conjugate (regular and irregular) verbs in a search (e.g. searching for quepa in Spanish will direct you to the verb caber, “to fit”, as well as tell you what conjugation quepa is of this verb and give a link to its full conjugation table). If the base dictionary doesn’t have the term you are looking for, unless it’s really obscure, it’s likely that someone else will have asked about it in the forums and there will be a link to that discussion for you to read. You can of course ask the question yourself if you sign up for a free account.

One advantage of this over some other simple dictionaries is that it usually has several entries on a single word if it can be translated in other ways, and would usually give at least a one word synonym as well as possibly an example sentence to suggest context. It can help for some technical terminology, but I usually avoid this dictionary if the word is technical. This dictionary is very good for Spanish, French and Italian (to/from English) since these options have been on the site for several years. It is less extensive, but is constantly improving for German, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.

Proz

The Proz term search results (using the Kudoz option) are provided entirely by translators who have spent time working on researching that particular term. It is excellent for more technical words, and all terminology is given in categories, and the term itself is almost always given in the sentence and context that is relevant to it. This is important for confidence, since one-word translations of words for all situations are actually not that common as I suggested above in the Wikipedia example. It has a huge amount of language options and you can ask a question yourself if you don’t find a satisfactory answer in the search.

Because nearly all of these solutions are given by professional translators, this dictionary is not useful for basic terminology that fluent speakers are presumed to know already. If your term contains several words, use quotation marks ” ” for that exact phrase, or plus signs + to include each word in no particular order. Just searching for all the words directly will give an “OR” result, which is not useful for set phrases.

IATE

The InterActive Terminology for Europe is a vast database of terminology applied in official public EU documents, covering many fields and all official EU languages. Depending on the word you wish to translate, this may be the most appropriate source. Example translations are given and you can search by category. This is quite technical, and not the best for more natural language.

MyMemory

I have recently discovered MyMemory from translated.net, and I am quite impressed! It opens up Translation Memories from professional translators and makes them searchable. Like other sites mentioned here, it has many language combinations, and category relevant search options and is constantly updated.

Bilingual dictionaries

It’s harder to be general here, because there are so many languages to cover, and there may be very good dictionaries for any given language (to/from English). Ones that I have come across so far include Grand dictionnaire termilogique, Quebec’s officially promoted dictionary, which has saved me on occasion for French translations much more than some of those above. Once again, this is a dictionary for technical terminology.

For German you can use Leo, for Irish there’s focal.ie, Slovnik for Czech and many, many more! Instead of listing them all here, maybe you can help me and provide a link to your favourite online dictionary in the comments? Any experience with the sites that I’ve mentioned? Do share! In a later post, I’ll be coming back to how you can better use some of these dictionaries, so if you haven’t subscribed to this site yet, now is the best time

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Finding translation work

So, if you read my previous post you’ll know that I was in a pretty bad situation two and a half years ago; I had no job or money, my long-term career plan was destroyed and I was going to Canada with no working visa in hand. This forced me to consider online-based work. I’m glad that I was presented with this challenge because my temporary solution has turned out to be a job I get great satisfaction out of, and of course have continued with!

My initial approach to find work was rather clumsy! I basically wrote out my CV in all the languages I knew, and prepared a cover letter for each one too… and then copied and pasted the cover letter + CV to no less than two thousand emails! I found these emails by doing a search for translation companies directly on the yellow pages in Spain and France etc. Most of them ignored me, a lot of them just gave me a negative response, but one out of the two thousand called me back! After not speaking in French for over two years (and learning two more languages since then, further confusing my French) I suddenly had a spontaneous interview in French on the phone while travelling in a noisy train in Italy. They gave me a trial period, proofread all of my translations for a month and finally took me on! I still work with them. That’s the beauty of being freelance, you work with people, not for them

However, I wouldn’t recommend this approach for those in a similar situation. There are two good translator social networking websites; Proz and translatorscafé, which have forums and many other features. But the most interesting part of these sites can be their job search boards. The translatorscafé one is free – I can’t say much for that since I have never used it. The Proz one has a free version and a paid version; the free version shows you the advertisements after several hours delay, in which time someone else is likely to take the offer. I signed up for a paid account and have found all my other clients (technically outsourcers who look for clients for me) through that site. I find that it works pretty well; especially since you can leave and read references, which is great for confirming that they will actually pay you.

It is important to have a competitive price! If you have no experience at all, then you should actually start working for next to nothing or for free (or as a volunteer) and have your documents proofread so that you can learn how to actually translate before you start trying it professionally. After my training period, I started off with a kind-of low rate because of my lack of experience and then I raised my price last year. Many translators charge per word, which I much prefer to all my previous monthly wage jobs since I get paid for the actual work that I do. The current global economic situation seemed to have caught up with me this summer as I had no work at all for over a month. I’ve reduced my price back to the previous one and have gotten a flood of work because of it. I’ll have to be working 10-12 hours a day for the next few weeks to balance out the debt created by the summer lag and new reduced price, and this will have a serious negative impact on my current 3-month-fluency mission. But more on that in the next post!

The actual price you charge depends on a lot of factors; those who translate novels, for example, may charge much more per word than I do (or would charge per page), but our hourly wage is about the same. I am very familiar with the technical documents I translate and never need to ponder over a more poetic way to say it (as a writer-translator would for example) so I can charge less but still earn the same because I’ll produce more words an hour. Also, the language combination is very important – you may be able to charge more for a language that is more in demand, or need to be more competitive if you have a common language combination.

The importance of a good background and specialisation

I usually like to say how my methods of learning a language are easy for everyone to apply. But becoming a translator definitely isn’t for everyone! Translators do not get the credit they deserve; if you read poorly translated instructions on a cheap gadget from China it certainly doesn’t help! But when you do read a translation (which happens more often than you might think!) and don’t realize it, that’s the sign of a good translator! Always an unsung hero, because it doesn’t seem like it was ever even originally in a foreign language!

Translating a text isn’t a simple task of writing over the words in a text document, which “anyone” with casual understanding of the source language and being a native in the target language can do. You need to understand the source language extremely well and at a professional level.

However, you can’t be a translator just because you speak another language, even if you speak it really well. You need training and experience as a translator and complete familiarity with the subject you are translating.

Any translation work that I accept is always just for my fields of speciality, mostly related to my studies in Electronic Engineering. Thanks to my studies and work experience both in Ireland and abroad, when I translate a document I write as an engineer / computer scientist naturally would, and do so only in English. No matter how many crazy 3-month language-learning missions I have, or even if I manage to speak like a native some day, I will still likely be lacking in some (especially written) subtleties in the language and without much more experience as an engineer in foreign languages, it would be very unprofessional of me (or anyone in my situation) to accept work translating to a non-native language. Those horrible translations I mentioned above are usually done by those who think that they master the language and rarely do. This is a very crucial thing to realize; you should only ever translate to your mother tongue!

And specialisation should not be taken lightly either! When I was training to be a translator, it was extremely frustrating that I would get documents from a wide range of topics, none of which I was familiar with. I tried to translate wine cultivation techniques, legal and medical documents, corporate presentations etc. and it was always a disaster! Luckily all of my work was proofread and completely corrected each time before actually being used. I am not a lawyer or a doctor or a wine-lover so I simply can’t write about these topics in English, let alone understand them in a foreign language! This means that I should never translate them of course. I do not have a degree in translation, but I actually find it easier to get work than some people that I have talked with who do, because I focus on a very narrow selection of documents to translate that I can write very naturally. Being more flexible in your translation topics does not necessarily make you more employable since you may have little or no familiarity or authority in that field. Someone who has studied translation in university needs to somehow also become an expert in any fields they wish to translate. Luckily for me, my specialisation and language learning and training as a translator has been enough to help me to produce good translations.

Doing the work

So when you’ve got the translation, you just open up the Word document and replace the original text, right? Some translators may work like that, but it is horribly inefficient and cumbersome for the kinds of documents I translate! We have Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools (not to be confused with Machine Translation!!!) that help us translate more efficiently and are especially useful in translations with recurring vocabulary (legal, technical etc.). These tools can produce a file called a Translation Memory (TM), which lets you or other translators work with the same theme later and not lose consistency in terminology, and you can even translate faster as it points out and automatically replaces repetitions.

For those interested in starting off with this, I recommend installing the free Open Source CAT tool OmegaT (along with the free Open Office suite). Unfortunately, many outsourcers much prefer to work with the TMs produced by Trados, which is quite expensive. I made the investment this year and do actually like the interface and I can work with those who require it now. I used to work with Wordfast, which I also quite liked. If you’d like to buy these programs, you should actually do it through the Proz website, since they have huge group-paying reductions for all the major CAT tools, cycling through each one regularly. There is quite a learning curb with these programs, so it’s definitely better to start with the free version and you may never need to change!

So I translate the document by the proposed deadline and send the result (and TM file(s) if requested) and add that quotation to an invoice that I send at the end of the month. They normally pay 30 days later. The annoying thing about this is that you won’t actually have the money for any work you do the first week of the month for about 2 months! This aspect of freelancing takes some getting used to!

Note that a VAT number for your resident country (which can be applied for easily enough) is essential in order to get serious clients and for legal reasons.

Making it location-independent

As you will have seen in my previous post about not needing to be rich to travel, I take this work with me no matter where I am. Once you can work from home, why can’t that home be on the other side of the planet? Since my clients transfer payments to my bank account, I can take it out of an ATM in any country and use it there .

I rent a Skype-In telephone number so that I don’t have to bother my clients with new number changes as I travel. I’ve actually had the same fixed phone number for the last two and a half years that forwards any calls to whatever mobile number (11 different countries/numbers since I started freelancing) that I happen to have at the time. Emails require immediate responses, so when I don’t have work on some particular day I can still leave the house but I have my iPhone push new emails to me and notify me of them. There have been some time-zone issues (California is one of the worst places I’ve lived in for synchronising with European times, with midnight to 8am responsiveness needed…), but I’ve found work-arounds and have comfortably travelled with this job since I started it!

I can’t emphasise enough that this job is definitely not for everyone! I get contacted so many times from people with intermediate (or less) in languages who think that if Google Translate can do it, then surely they can too! No. In fact, my in-house translation work was by far the worst job I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a LOT!!) that made me extremely reluctant to try working in this field again. And if it wasn’t for that training I wouldn’t be able to do it either, since getting trained to learn about the important subtelties involved in translation really is necessary. Nevertheless, I hope this post at least explains a little about how I work for those curious! I’ll come back to particular aspects of how to translate in more detail in later posts, especially when it also applies to language learning. Any other translators out there with a different story and point of view, please do share

You can also check out these two blogs from translators who are much more experienced than me: Musings from an overworked translator and There’s something about translation. There is even an online comic strip about translators! If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments! If these tips are at all useful to you, then to thank me you can always treat me to an Orange Juice! Every little drop is appreciated
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Unlike most of my posts, this one is not a general “how to” that I think everyone can also follow. It’s my random story of the path I took to get to my current job; for those curious . This post does not have any useful information about finding work as a translator etc. It is purely background information for my next post which I will talk about my actual work itself. Feel free to skip this post if you aren’t curious about the story!!

Most unlikely candidate: Language-stupid electronic engineer

There is no way that I pictured myself as a translator after I graduated from UCD as an Electronic Engineer. Until I figured out what holds us all back from really learning, I was a self-confessed idiot with languages. I had only ever studied German formally, and my exam results were always less than impressive. But my year in Valencia completely changed everything for me. I was exposed not just to Spanish, but to dozens of other cultures and languages through the Erasmus programme (even though I wasn’t taking part in the programme myself). I had already decided after a short time that I wanted to speak several languages; not just Spanish. I promised all of my Erasmus friends that I would speak each of their languages one day, and despite receiving a lot of scepticism at the time, I’m not doing too badly in keeping that promise

I even found a cool job possibility to combine my undergraduate degree and new passion for languages. There is an intensive Masters in Conference Interpreting that I really wanted to study; it doesn’t matter what your undergraduate degree is because you can interprete conferences for that speciality (medicine, law, technology etc.), and it takes just one academic year to finish it, and it’s not that expensive. Best of all, the same course can be studied in different countries. I put it in the back of my mind for almost 4 years because first… I had to actually be able to speak the languages!!

More experience, qualifications and more languages

I initially worked as an engineer in Spain before teaching English, and after almost a year and a half since graduation with no relevant engineering experience I found a job with a cool company in Paris as an intern for 9 months. I didn’t like Paris at all, but the job was fantastic and gave my CV a well needed boost. When I moved to Toulouse, I studied for and passed the DELF (which wasn’t that hard; in retrospect I should have gone for the higher level DALF and will soon enough) to formally prove some competence in French.

Learning several other languages was great, but formalising your level for recognition is also important. So I went on to do the Spanish DELE (this time the highest level possible), and studied for the Italian CELI (but didn’t have the time to take it). All of these diplomas are recognised world-wide, are inexpensive and do not require any particular course to be able to sit the actual exam.

Then the time came when I felt I was ready for the Masters! Out of all the places I could study for it, my only options for this particular Masters were London (too expensive and English speaking), Paris (don’t like) and La Laguna in Spain. My Italian wasn’t good enough to consider studying for it through that language, so all my hopes were for moving to Tenerife for a year! I thought that I had a pretty solid application, but to make it a little better I decided to work as a translator for a few months. Never something I actually wanted to do; I only wanted a little experience to improve my CV for the extremely competitive application procedure for the Interpretation Masters.

First and last job as an in-house translator

After lots of searching, I found a company in Italy that agreed to train me half-time as a translator for a poor wage and accepted me only because the other half-time I would teach English in their language school. I feel that I am a really good English teacher and after years of experience and excellent references it was almost impossible for me to not get any job I applied for as a teacher. Normally the wages would be pretty good, but I made the sacrifice this time for the translation training aspect of my work.

It was tough. They wanted me to learn quickly so that I would be a useful translator to the company before my contract ran out, so all texts I produced were scrutinised and unapologetically criticised. Translating isn’t just a simple case of guessing a “pretty good” equivalent; you have to research the correct terminology and confirm it appears in that context elsewhere etc. I got to learn all of this and more, but instead of an academic environment, I had a stressful work one. Despite learning a lot, I hated the job; I had an incredible 3 hour commute on the train daily and would only get home around 11pm and get up before 6am to get the train on time.

Then I got some horrible news… La Laguna had changed their application procedure for that year (and only that year) and were not accepting any applications from those wishing to interprete from Spanish. Only to (i.e. only natives). I had a long and complicated time trying to get out of the work contract and reassess my situation. This was a huge disappointment, but I had to continue on and find another option.

I decided to continue my travels anyway, and applied for a working visa in Canada. Normally, us Irish are given working visas very quickly but I rushed off the application form and lied about currently residing in Ireland (which is crucial for acceptance). Note to self: when lying about being currently in Ireland, don’t send the application form in a letter with Italian stamps on it and a big fat IRLANDA written as part of the address… Naturally, they turned me down, and I found this out after I had already arranged accommodation with some friends for the entire summer. I really wanted to go and my complete lack of money, or work, or future job prospects wasn’t going to stop me!

That’s when I considered Internet-based translation as a temporary solution for the summer… but more on that in the next post!!
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