By Tanya Harvey Ciampi, 6653 Verscio, Switzerland

These techniques supplement the WWW Search Interfaces for Translators at www.multilingual.ch, which are presented as part of my Internet Search Techniques Course for Translators at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences Winterthur (ZHW): Department of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies - former School for Translators and Interpreters in Zurich (DOZ) (=> Details of next course...).

1. Search for your term along with common words that identify your target language

Use one, two or more of these words together to refine your search.

Example: Finding a French translation of the English term "jumbo certificate of deposit":

Tip: If you cannot find anything with "jumbo certificate of deposit", increase your results by breaking down your phrase to "jumbo certificate".

In Google, search for:

"jumbo certificate" est

For example an English/French bilingual glossary with definitions:

Source: Entire page (web page)

Similarly, for Italian:

Example: Finding an Italian translation of the English "jumbo certificate":

"jumbo certificate" è "il"

For example an English/Italian bilingual glossary with definitions:

Source: web page

Example: Finding an English translation of the German term "Ersatzurkunde":

Ersatzurkunde "the" "is"

This finds, for example, a translation nearby:

Source: http://www2.boerse-stuttgart.de/pdf/eng/7usancen_englisch.pdf

Technique no. 1 produces different results from technique no. 4 as the presence of terms in, say, French (imagine a page with assembly instructions in 8 languages) does not necessarily mean that the search engine has classified the page as being a page in French. Consequently technique no. 1 generally yields more results than technique no. 4.

2. Search for your term along with a word that you are certain of in your target language

Example: Finding a French translation of the English term "jumbo certificate of deposit":

"jumbo certificate" certificat

For example an English/French bilingual glossary with definitions:

Similarly, for Italian:

Example: Finding an Italian translation of the English "jumbo certificate":

"jumbo certificate" certificato

In Altavista you can use the letter wildcard (*) to increase your results:

jumbo certificate* AND (certificato OR certificati)

Again in Altavista:

Example: Finding an English translation of the German "steuerpflichtig":

steuerpflichtig* AND tax

The letter wildcard allows you to cover "steuerpflichtig", "steuerpflichtige", "steuerpflichtiger", "steuerpflichtigen" etc.

This finds for example the following German/English bilingual tax glossary:

Source: http://www.pinkernell.de/glossary.htm

With this particular technique, searches involving target language German (or, for that matter, any language that joins words together) can sometimes be more difficult, depending on the part of the word that you are looking for:

Example: Finding a German translation of the English "jumbo certificate":

Problem: If you search for "zertifikat", although you might find "Jumbo-zertifikat" (considered two separate words because of the hyphen), you will NOT find for example "Jumbozertifikat" (providing the term existed in German).

Although in Altavista you can use the letter wildcard to search for "Jumbo*" [*=0-... additional characters] - of little use in this particular example as it is the first part of the word that we are looking for - you CANNOT search for "*zertificat" as you can only use "*" after at least 3 characters.

In this particular case your best option is technique no. 1.

You can narrow your search even further by determining the exact sequence of your terms:

Example: Finding an English translation of the German "Anlageerfolg":

"anlageerfolg investment"

For example:

Source: http://www.fmi.uni-passau.de/~zimmerth/aktienindizes/kapitel4.html

NOTE: The search engine has ignored the parenthesis.

Or else try the other way round:

"investment * anlageerfolg"

The word wildcard also works in Altavista (with one * or more). In Altavista's Advanced Search you do not need the quotation marks to search for a phrase. But do use all lower-case letters in your search to obtain maximum results as AV is case sensitive.

In Altavista you could also try the Boolean operator NEAR:

anlageerfolg NEAR investment

3. Search for a bilingual glossary or parallel texts on the same page

Search for your term along with the names of your source language and target language in various languages. An OR should be placed between the variants in the various languages.

NOTE: Remember that Google imposes a limit of 10 words in its searches. If you overstep this limit, the words at the end of your search string will be ignored.

Example: Finding an English translation of the Italian "raccomandata A.R.":

"raccomandata A.R." italiano OR italian OR italienisch OR italien inglese OR english OR englisch OR anglais
[languages expressed in It, En, De, Fr]

"raccomandata A.R." italian OR italiano OR italienisch english OR inglese OR englisch OR inglés
[languages expressed in En, It, De, Es]

This finds for example the following Italian/English/French multilingual postal glossary:

Source: Entire page (web page)

This type of search can sometimes find parallel texts on different pages, whereby the words referring to the different languages (italian, italiano etc.) are the text of hyperlinks pointing to the same page in a different language.

4. Search for your term on a page in your target language

In Google, click on Language Tools and select your target language. Now search for your source language term. Remember to enclose phrases in quotation marks.

This search yields similar results to those of technique no. 1.

5. Search for your term on a page in a target-language-speaking country

If you find a French term, say, on a website in, say, the United Kingdom, you may well find an English translation of your term somewhere, either on the same page or on a different page.

If the URL contains a language code, modify it to obtain the page in your target language if available. Alternatively, use the site's search engine, if available, to locate the required page by searching for codes, people's names or other elements that are bound to remain the same in the other language.

In Google, click on Language Tools and select a target-language-speaking country. Now search for your source language term. Remember to enclose phrases in quotation marks.

Google is currently the best search engine for this type of search: By restricting your search to, say, Germany, you will find not only websites with the .de domain, but also .com, .org, .net, .gov etc. websites residing on servers in Germany.

How does that work? Google's country filter narrows down your search based on the IP addresses of the servers hosting the web pages (IP address=numeric address: each region is assigned a specific range of numbers), regardless of the websites' domain names.

*****************************************

Try these techniques for yourselves:

Glossary

These tricks are located at: www.multilingual.ch
under WWW Search Interfaces for Translators/Tricks

Back / About me / Home

Print this page