Electronic Dictionaries, Glossaries and Terminology Databases

Consulting electronic or digital dictionaries on the computer does not at first appear radically different from using paper dictionaries. However, the advantages soon become clear. It takes far less time to type in a word on the computer and receive an answer than to look through a paper dictionary; there is immediate access to related data through links; and it is possible to use several dictionaries simultaneously by working with multiple documents.

Electronic dictionaries are available in several forms: as software that can be installed in the computer; as CD-ROMs and, most importantly, through the Internet. The search engine Google, for example, gives us access to a huge variety of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in many languages, although it is sometimes necessary to become on-line subscribers, as with the Oxford English Dictionary. On-line dictionaries organize material for us from their corpus because they are not simply a collection of words in isolation. For example, we can ask for all words related to one key word, or for all words that come from a particular language. That is to say, they allow immediate cross-access to information.

For help with specific terminology there is a wide range of dictionaries, glossaries and databases on the Internet.

b) Analyze the results and answer the questions:

1) Which way is more convenient? Why do you think so?

2) Which way is more accurate? Why?

3) What corrections and editing did you have to make?

c) Decide whether the following sentences are true (T) or false (F):

1 Some machine translation (MT) systems produce good translations.

2 It is difficult to compare different MT systems.

3 The easiest way to evaluate any machine translation of a given text is to compare it to a human translation of the same text.

d) Read the following text and check your answers to the previous task: