Skip to main content

Linguee

http://www.linguee.com

I've just come across the brilliant dictionary and translation/search engine site Linguee. This is a major addition to the tools available to teachers, students and translators. It comes from a team in Germany and could be serious competition for Wordreference. You can search individual words or whole phrases and idiomatic expressions and it will use its search engine to find the translations in real contexts, something Wordreference does not do. I would need to spend longer with it to see how useful it is in everyday use, but first impressions are very good.

They say:

Linguee is a unique translation tool combining an editorial dictionary and a search engine with which you can search through hundreds of millions of bilingual texts for words and expressions.

The Linguee search results are divided into two sections. On the left hand side you will see results from our reliable editorial dictionary. The results are displayed clearly and offer you a quick overview of the translation options. On the right hand side, you will find example sentences from other sources to provide you with an impression of how your search expression has been translated in context.

Compared to traditional online dictionaries, Linguee contains about 1,000 times more translated texts, which are displayed in full sentences. , Linguee will show translations for expressions such as "strong evidence", "strong relationship" or "strong opinion", and even for rare expressions or specific technical terms.

The young editors are at pains to say that it is not an internet translator. They add:

The vocabulary you see on the left hand side has been checked by our editors and is constantly enhanced manually.

The majority of the example sentences you see on the right hand side is from the bilingual web, particularly from professionally translated websites of companies, organizations, and universities. Other valuable sources include EU documents and patent specifications.
A specialised computer program, a web crawler, automatically searches the internet for multiple language webpages. These pages are detected automatically, and the translated sentences and words are extracted. The texts are then evaluated by a machine-learning algorithm which filters out the high quality translations for display. This system is capable of autonomously learning new quality criteria from user feedback to tell good translations from bad ones. It has found out, for instance, that a page is usually machine translated if it contains the word "Wordpress" while many words are literally translated. Through this training process, our algorithm is continuously learning to find thousands of such correlations and reliably extract the best translations autonomously. Our computers have already compared more than a trillion sentences. At the end of the day, only the top 0.01 per cent, i.e. 100 million of the translated sentences, are retained.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,