This page presents you with a number of useful
online dictionaries, spelling and usage guides,
glossaries and encyclopedias in various European
languages:
Keep on coming back to this list as it gets updated
from time to time.
Dutch resources
This site is a real treasury of information about
the Dutch language, language education and language
policy in Dutch-speaking countries. Click on the word
"taalunie" above to go to the site.
Click
here to go to the latest edition of the official
spelling guidelines published in Oct. 2005
(Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal).
There's a lot of interesting information on this
site, so have a good look around it.
Van Dale is one of the Netherlands' best-known
dictionary publishers. On their website, you can use an
abridged electronic version of their chunky one-volume
dictionary of modern Dutch, Van Dale Hedendaags
Nederlands (at no charge).
You can also learn about their current Dutch
dictionaries here, a number of which are bilingual, and
order products online.
Click here to
go to the online dictionary.
Encyclo is a Dutch encyclopedia with a translation
feature (in various languages) and a spelling check
(Taalunie).
Besides searching for specific terms, you can also
look for them alphabetically or using any of Encyclo's
32 categories.
It draws on 715 sources, including online
dictionaries and smaller encyclopedias covering
particular fields like art and history.
French dictionaries
This resource is more than just a simple,
monolingual French dictionary - as well as listing and
defining individual terms, it also includes lexical
information (collocations) and grammatical details
(conjugations).
You can look for French synonyms and even get
English translations of the French terms you've just
keyed in (and vice versa). It's a very convenient tool,
and it's free to use.
Try out the browser add-ons they offer to make
access even easier.
French dictionary publisher Larousse also has a French online resource that can be used for free.
This database draws on five of Larousse's French dictionaries: a large general one along with dictionaries of synonyms/antonyms, idioms, homonyms and quotations.
Besides this valuable monolingual work, the publisher also provides various bilingual dictionaries on its website (e.g. French-English, French-German and French-Arabic) and a machine-translation tool (which is probably a laugh to use!).
German-English/English-German dictionaries
A useful online dictionary is
available at
dict.cc run by Paul Hemetsberger. This is partly
based on the language data used by BEOLINGUS (see
below). The site also includes a translators'
forum for asking and answering users' queries
and there's a free toolbar you can download for
your Web browser.
NB: If you search for a term here,
dict.cc allows you to search other dictionary
websites for the same term (e.g. LEO,
BEOLINGUS, PONS or LinguaDict, all of which are listed
here, too) or continue your search in Google or
linguistic databases in German.
German language software company Linguatec has
created a powerful, free-to-use online dictionary for
Ger-Eng and Eng-Ger (as well as Ger-Fre and vice
versa).
It frequently offers a wide range of accurate
translations of terms and is therefore a valuable
resource.
Click here to use
the dictionaries on their website.
The Reverso website contains digitised versions of
a wide range of Collins dictionaries. The Collins
German-English Dictionary is a complete and
unabridged version based on the 5th edition from
2004.
LEO is actually a variety of resources that also
cover three bilingual dictionaries: Ger-Eng, Ger-French
and Ger-Spanish.
The Ger-Eng/Eng-Ger dictionary
contains a corpus of over 400,000 entries. It can be
quite helpful at times, but in our opinion the
dictionary database contains some surprising gaps in
vocabulary.
In our opinion, LEO's main strength actually lies
in its user forum as the expressions
users suggest for inclusion get discussed by other
users here, including native speakers.
If you can't find a term in the dictionary, try any
of the other dictionaries listed on this page,
particularly dict.cc and LinguaDict.
This free-to-use German-English/Eng-Ger
dictionary maintained by Chemnitz University
of Science and Technology (TU Chemnitz) contains "more
than 680,000 translations with examples and hints,
explanations, synonyms, sayings, aphorisms and
quotations."
We occasionally find it a useful supplement to LEO,
especially if you're looking for a technical term, but
LinguaDict and dict.cc may well prove more helpful,
depending on the subject area in question. Try it out
and see for yourself.
Projekt Deutscher Wortschatz
This is a German-English/English-German
dictionary maintained by the University of
Leipzig, Germany. According to their own description,
it contains approx. 400,000 entries drawn from 90,000
English words and 150,000 German terms.
When you key in a term, a database application will
be started that searches a large corpus of data
belonging to the "Projekt Deutscher Wortschatz". Click
on the image above to go to the opening page of the
dictionary.
The bilingual online dictionaries
maintained by PONS (Ernst Klett
Verlag) cover German-English, German-French,
German-Italian, German-Spanish and German-Polish.
They're free to use and are good, but aren't very
comprehensive.
Download their free toolbar for
your Web browser in order to access the dictionaries
from any Web page without having to go to the PONS site
first.
Launched in April 2009, newcomer
Linguee.de is a linguistic search engine with a lot
of potential for translators.
Why's that? Well, it doesn't give you a one- or
two-word equivalent of a source word in the target
language like a conventional dictionary does, but
presents the source and target term in an excerpt of a
text that has already been translated. The term you
enter is generally marked in bold print and is embedded
in a sentence or paragraph.
It's a bit like looking at a translation database
with the source text on the left and the target text on
the right.
In other words, the term or phrase you're looking
for is always presented in a particular context (or
several different ones if enough texts have been fed
into the Linguee database beforehand). This way you can
often see which translation fits the bill and which one
doesn't.
Admittedly, Linguee.de doesn't always come up with
exactly the word or phrase you're looking for and it
sometimes lists sentences that haven't been translated
correctly, but that's because it draws on freely
available texts of varying quality on the Net.
Used thoughtfully (like any other dictionary, for
that matter), it can nevertheless be a valuable
terminological resource for professional translators.
In my own experience, it's frequently come up with the
right term.
An extra benefit Linguee.de has is that it quotes
the source of each text and displays it as a
hyperlink, so you can just click on a potentially
interesting one and learn more about the subject area
(and its specific jargon) by jumping to that particular
page.
Try it out and see for yourself!
Key EU resources
IATE, or "Interactive Terminology
for Europe", is a huge language resource originally
intended for use by professionals working at or for the
European Union. Made available to the general Internet
community in March 2007, it has succeeded
eurodicautom and contains its entire
database.
Like its predecessor, it "covers a broad spectrum
of human knowledge, but is particularly rich in
technical and specialised terminology (agriculture,
telecommunications, transport, legislation, finance)
related to EU policy".
EUR-Lex
If you need the official title of an EU law, treaty
or international agreement in English or any of the
other EU languages, then use the EUR-Lex website for
your search.
Amper Translation Service, ATS, reference works,
dictionary, dictionaries, glossary, synonyms, sayings,
acronyms, abbreviations, terminology, translation,
bilingual, thesaurus, encyclopedia, encyclopaedia,
Wörterbuch, Glossar, Abkürzungen, Terminologie,
Deutsch, German, English, Danish, dansk, French,
Norwegian, Scandinavian, Dutch, Nederlands, Taalunie,
Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal, Dutch Language Union,
spelling, LEO, BEOLINGUS, PONS, Reverso, Collins,
Duden, Rechtschreibung, Universalwörterbuch, dict.cc,
lexicool, norsk, bokmål, nynorsk, ordbok,
Bokmålsordboka, Nynorskordboka, Oxford University
Press, resources, forums, Norsk språkråd, newsletter,
Wortschatz-Portal, vocabulary, Projekt Deutscher
Wortschatz, Zwiebelfisch, OpenThesaurus, wissen.de,
LinguaDict, Van Dale, Hedendaags Nederlands, IATE,
eurodicautom, Linguee, Linguee.de, Langenscheidt,
Fremdwörterbuch, loanwords, Danish Language Council,
Dansk Sprognævn, retskrivning, dansk, norsk, tysk,
svenska, engelsk, ordbog, ordbøger,
retskrivningsordbog, Encyclo, Babylon, MOT,
Kielikone
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Babylon
This site will probably already be familiar to you.
Babylon offers its users a wide range of bilingual
online dictionaries. Try it out and see what you
think.
The MOT dictionaries
Kielikone Ltd is a Finnish company that produces
and markets language software for business users. Its
range of products includes dictionary, machine
translation and proof-reading software for Internet,
intranet and mobile use.
The firm's "MOT" Dictionary Service gives you
online access to a wide range of quality dictionaries
in various languages. To do this, you need to take out
a modest subscription.
The interesting thing about MOT is that you can
tailor the service to your own needs, picking only the
general and/or technical dictionaries you actually
require. Glossaries are also available.
In addition, when you log on as a user and key in a
word to find out what its translation is, Kielikone's
MOT application presents you with a one-page list of
hits found in all of the dictionaries you've subscribed
to. This saves you a lot of time you'd otherwise have
to spend leafing through different online and paper
dictionaries.
Click here to see
what general dictionaries you can use. There are
digital dictionaries from Oxford University Press,
Collins and Langenscheidt, for example, as well as
various Finnish works. Further dictionaries are being
added in 2009.
If you're interested in a free 7-day trial, fill in
the request form on Kielikone's
website.
German resources
The Duden website enables paying users to access a
range of the publisher's own dictionaries in
German, including its large
Universalwörterbuch and other works on synonyms,
foreign loanwords, and acronyms and abbreviations.
Unfortunately, full-length entries are only
accessible if you pay for them, but the monthly rates
are reasonable at the moment (April 2009). The first
line of an entry is shown for free (this is mainly
etymology, but sometimes contains an explanation,
too).
To sign up for Duden's free bi-weekly
newsletter on aspects of the German language
(capitalisation, phrases, sayings, etymology, etc.),
just click here.
Unlike Duden, Langenscheidt has made a
dictionary of foreign loanwords (Fremdwörter)
used in German available to the public completely free
of charge (very laudable of them, too!).
The dictionary contains "approx. 33,000 of the
foreign loanwords most frequently used in German,
including technical terms used in medicine, technology,
commerce, law and politics".
The full-text search feature ("Volltext") is
especially useful as it displays and explains various
grammatical forms of the term you enter (e.g.
adjectives and adverbs as well as nouns). Click
here to access it.
Wortschatz-Portal
The University of Leipzig has done a lot of
research on German vocabulary and has also set up its
own free-to-use "Wortschatz-Portal".
To go there, click on the blue image on the left.
To find out information about specific words in
German, click here. The
database provides details about the frequency of a
word, the subject area in which it's found, grammatical
aspects, synonyms and it also quotes sentences in its
corpus in which the word occurs.
This is a popular, free-to-use knowledge
portal in German run by a Bertelsmann
subsidiary. The site provides high-quality information
on 12 different subject areas.
By clicking on the logo above, you can access a
comprehensive encyclopedia
(one that includes technical terms) as well as two
large standard German
dictionaries: "WAHRIG Deutsche
Rechtschreibung" and "BERTELSMANN
Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache".
This is a German dictionary of
synonyms and closely related
words. There were over 41,000 synonyms listed
in it in February 2007.
OpenThesaurus is an Open Source project and anyone
can contribute to it providing they register as an
editor first. In addition to the German thesaurus,
there are also several other independent language
versions.
Key a German term into the field below and click on
"Synonyme..." to get a list of related terms.
This website enables you to search for
German abbreviations and acronyms. Click on
the banner above to call up the search page.
NB: If you can't find what you're
looking for, then go to the "Links" page on their site
and see if one of the other lists they mention looks
more useful.
Bastian Sick has been writing a column on
tricky aspects of the German language for
current affairs magazine Der Spiegel for some
time now and has also published several very successful
paperbacks containing selected articles.
Just click on the name of the column to go to the
page at the Spiegel website. Bastian Sick now
also writes a Zwiebelfisch newsletter
once a fortnight. To subscribe to it, click here.
Scandinavian dictionaries
Danish
The Danish Language Council (Dansk Sprognævn) has
put a useful spelling dictionary on
the Net. Click on the banner above to access it.
The page that opens also enables you to follow up
further links on various aspects of modern Danish such
as language policy, the Council's mission, its
publications and its guidelines on using commas.
Test your knowledge of Danish orthography at this
site or browse through the interesting list of FAQs
about everyday Danish.
This dictionary focuses specifically on IT terms
used in Danish. It also enables you to find the Danish
equivalents of certain English IT terms.
Norwegian
Click
here to go to "Bokmålsordboka og Nynorskordboka",
an online dictionary created and
maintained by ILN (Institutt for lingvistiske og
nordiske studier at the University of Oslo).
This reference work was produced in conjunction
with Norsk språkråd and was last updated in January
2007.
This website run by Kunnskapsforlaget, a Norwegian
publisher, allows you to subscribe to a large number of
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. You can
use one of the Norwegian dictionaries for free.
Swedish
"Lexin är en kombination av lexikon och ordböcker
som har tagits fram av Myndigheten för skolutveckling
för användning i invandrarundervisningen."
To go to LEXIN's free-to-use
Swedish-English/English-Swedish dictionary, click
here.
Incidentally, their dictionaries are also available
in other languages that many Swedish immigrants
speak.
Further resources for you
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