Terminology Resources Part I: Term searching and EU resources

Since starting a traineeship at the Council of the European Union in February I have been introduced to a variety of new resources for terminology research. As part of my training here I learnt how to edit the IATE terminology database, ensuring that entries are sufficiently detailed and properly categorised.

Below I have outlined the main resources that I use when researching terminology. I discovered some of them here and some I have been using since the early days at university. I hope you find my comments useful and please feel free to suggest any important resources that I have missed out.

Term Searching:

WordReference:

This is my favourite online dictionary. It is particularly useful for researching Spanish terms and it has specialised sections for business and legal terms. Its forums for queries about Spanish terms are a very useful resource and much more active than those for French. WordReference now has both a Collins dictionary tab and a WordReference tab, under which users can suggest alternative translations or improvements.

Linguee:

This website searches for multilingual websites and returns hits showing you how others have translated the term. While there is a basic tool allowing user feedback on the quality of the translations, terms found using this resource should still be verified. The top entries will usually be from EU texts, but be wary of these as well because EU phrasing is not necessarily the best or most natural way to say something to a native speaker.

ITI Spanish and French Networks:

These online communities are composed of ITI members working in Spanish and French. There are groups for translators of other languages, as well as for translators specialising in different areas. I find the members welcoming, supportive and extremely knowledgeable. Even if I do not have any queries to post for a while, I find I learn a lot from the other members' questions and responses, some of which I can contribute to myself.

Proz/Kudoz:

The Proz.com Kudoz section allows you to earn points for helping other translators with terminology queries. These points affect where you appear when potential clients search Proz for translators.

You can search all of the Proz databases simultaneously, including answered questions and glossaries, through their new term search function. Unfortunately you cannot use this search tool for words less than 3 characters long, so it is not very useful for short acronyms or abbreviations.

Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is useful if you want to know the name used for something in another language, for example the name of a film or an association. This is done by searching for the Wikipedia page for your association, film, concept etc. in your source language and then changing the language on the left-hand side of the page. However, Wikipedia is not 100% reliable (I have found it to be about 95% correct) so any terms found in this way should be verified.

Official websites:

Many organisations will have glossaries on their website. Some will also have different language versions of the site itself so you can find information on the same subject in your source and target languages. Switching the language of the website is especially useful for finding an organisation's official name in your target language as well as the names of specific projects.

Council/EU specific resources:

EUR-Lex:

This is the EU's public database of legislation. It has various search options, including a term search function. You can view two different language versions in parallel.

N-Lex:

This is the EU's database of EU member states' national legislation. Like EUR-Lex it has various search options. The search hits link to the member states' official government websites where the legislation is published, and the availability of different language versions depends on the member states' individual policies

IATE- (Public version available):

The internal IATE database is a more comprehensive and user friendly version of the publicly available database. It contains much more information than the freely available version, such as context, language usage and references. IATE widgets and browser extensions which access the public database are now available.

Euramis:

 This is basically the Linguee of the EU. It is a database of segments that can be searched. This search can be limited depending on how specific you want the search to be and where you want the term to come from e.g. Council, Commission or Parliament documents, or legislation. This allows you to see how the term has been translated in different contexts.

AIS:

This is a database of all the Council’s documents, which allows you to view different language versions in parallel and to search for specific terms. Its search features are somewhat limited and it is due to be replace by a more efficient and comprehensive system in the near future.

Part II will contain some glossaries that I find particularly useful and an outline of the online dictionaries I use most regularly.