Tuesday 1 June 2010

quilting bee

Pursuing my determined if not belated and unending quest to better my German language skills, I have come across a good internet resource called Linguee that uses the hive-mind of the web and far outstrips most other translator services.  Using the principle that rarely a totally unique query is put forward, it finds translations on a word or a phrase based on tranlated and bilingual texts it scans from a patchwork of all sources, travel sites, Wikipedia in other languages, governmental and scientific journals.  It deconstructs verb forms and tenses and even uses the word or phrase in several example sentences and puts legalese and technical jargon in context and is a good back-translator to check if one's own interpretation makes grammatical sense.