| User | Thread poster: karen henry Choice of French-English dictionaries |
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karen henry 
France
Local time: 04:20
 Member (2011)
French to English
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I'd like some advise please on what dictionaries to use for general translating from French into English, monolingual and bilingual. Should I invest in some books or are on-line sites good enough?
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Peter Linton
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2002)
Swedish to English
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My advice would be that books are clumsy, online sites are adequate, but the best solution is to have electronic dictionaries. These will save you much time and effort, and some enable you to construct your own dictionaries.
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Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2011)
Hebrew to English
| | Depends on Language Pair | Jan 31 |
.......but for such a big language pair like French>English, there should be ample online resources (this isn't the case for all languages though).
Hopefully a French-English translator will be along with more helpful advice.....
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Lori Cirefice
France
Local time: 04:20
French to English
| | second vote for electronic | Jan 31 |
I have both Le Robert & Collins (bilingual Fr-EN) and Merriam Webster (monolingual) in electronic format (actually, when I purchased the books, the CDs came with them). I never use the paper format, only the electronic format. Robert & Collins is an excellent general resource IMO. I also have Le Littré (downloaded I think from a website?) but don't really use it much, unless I happen to come across some obscure term... depending on your field, you might want to check that out. I think it was free of charge. The others may have been in the 100€ range, not sure now.
Of course I also use many online resources such as GDT, Termium, and some industry specific dictionaries such as dicobat... and more recently I discovered linguee which has its uses but certainly needs to be used with care. Other good online resources are EUR-Lex, IATE and of course KudoZ!
The resource I use the most frequently is Le Robert & Collins, I would not be able to replace that with any of the online resources I know of.
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Lisa Simpson, MCIL
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
 Member (2010)
Portuguese to English
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| | Collins & Larousse | Jan 31 |
I use a combination of the Collins & Larousse online. The last Collins I bought (2 or 3 years ago) gave me the option of a free subscription to their full online version. I had to contact them for login details and the dictionary was supposedly only available to those who had bought the paper dictionary. However, they changed the site a few weeks ago and it now seems to be accessible to anyone, no need to log in anymore. In short, other than the odd specialist dictionary I don't see any more need to buy general bilingual ones.
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Paul Harrison
France
Local time: 04:20
French to English
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| | Oxford Hachette CD ROM | Jan 31 |
I've used both the above and the Grand Robert & Collins and prefer the Oxford version: I think it offers more idiomatic, less literal, translations of a given word.
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Carole Paquis
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2007)
English to French
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I work the other way round, so my need for monolingual dictionaries is probably different.
Paper dictionaries:
The bilingual dictionary I always go back to is Collins.
As far as monolingual dictionaries go, I use Larousse, Littré and Robert in French. Encarta, Chambers and my very old New Imperial Dictionary in English.
I also have a Roget's thesaurus and a Dictionnaire des synonymes by Robert.
Online:
The OED
Littré
After that, it's all specialist dictionaries and reference books.
Carole
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Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2009)
French to English
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| | As many sources of inspiration as you feel you need | Jan 31 |
karen henry wrote:
I'd like some advise please on what dictionaries to use for general translating from French into English, monolingual and bilingual. Should I invest in some books or are on-line sites good enough? |
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Every dictionary you buy gives you the opinions/suggestions of an additional set of compilers, editors and consultants. In other words, every additional dictionary is a potential additional source of inspiration/ideas for those moments when you have a mental block or want a second, third (etc) opinion. So to some extent, I'd say you may as well get a copy of every major dictionary in the language pair-- there aren't so many.
Whether you use paper or electronic versions depends to a large extent on which way you prefer to work. If you are opting for free on-line dictionaries, I would say just make sure that what they're actually offering is the "full" version: if you're looking for as much input as possible on a translation, it's arguably pointless using an edition that you know has been abridged. (There are times when an abridged version is appropriate, but usually not in translation.)
It also depends on what types of translations you are doing. If much of your work relies heavily on specialist terminology, then you may find you have no choice: bar maybe one or two HIGHLY specialist dictionaries in a particular narrow field, the coverage of any paper dictionary generally pales into insignificance compared with the coverage of on-line sources such as Termium or IATE.
Personally, for general vocabulary I have a couple of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries in paper form, then a couple more in electronic form. I find the paper versions convenient for "spreading things out" on the desk rather than having everything squidged up on one screen, and the electronic versions handy for when I'm out and about, or for quick lookup of a few bits of terminology. However, I also find that even for general vocabulary, on-line translation databases an equal source of inspiration.
But that's just my personal way of working; you should find yours.
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Texte Style
France
Local time: 04:20
French to English
| | Hachette-Oxford is absolutely the best for me! | Jan 31 |
Paul Harrison wrote:
I've used both the above and the Grand Robert & Collins and prefer the Oxford version: I think it offers more idiomatic, less literal, translations of a given word. |
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I agree entirely!
Oxford-Hachette really gives you a suggestion someone has put thought into rather than a word that I could have come up with myself by getting rid of accents and replacing ique with ic, which is what loads of others tend to do
To take a very simple example: "différent". One of my quirks is that I tend to use "various" systematically unless "different" really is called for, because very often that's what you'd hear.
Hachette-Oxford gives you "different" and "various" and the first example is "pour différentes raisons" = "for various reasons"
It's years since I had a Robert-Collins, but I just checked Reverso which seems to be connected with Collins, and even the full list of possibilities did not include anything apart from "different"
Maybe a Robert-Collins owner might like to check their paper or CD version?
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Angela Dickson
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member
French to English
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Texte Style wrote:
To take a very simple example: "différent". One of my quirks is that I tend to use "various" systematically unless "different" really is called for, because very often that's what you'd hear.
Hachette-Oxford gives you "different" and "various" and the first example is "pour différentes raisons" = "for various reasons"
It's years since I had a Robert-Collins, but I just checked Reverso which seems to be connected with Collins, and even the full list of possibilities did not include anything apart from "different"
Maybe a Robert-Collins owner might like to check their paper or CD version? |
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I have the CD version of the full Collins-Robert and it does contain "various" as a translation of "différent" - but surely I can't be alone in thinking that a decent French to English translator (as I'm sure you are, Texte Style, don't get me wrong) doesn't actually need a dictionary to tell him/her that "différent" can sometimes be translated as "various"? "I did this for different reasons" is just plain wrong: unidiomatic English, unclear meaning.
To put it a different way: your strategy here, Texte Style, is not so much a quirk as a good habit that any good translator should try to foster.
[Edited at 2012-02-01 10:09 GMT]
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Angela Dickson
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member
French to English
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| | As your work develops | Feb 1 |
karen henry wrote:
I'd like some advise please on what dictionaries to use for general translating from French into English, monolingual and bilingual. Should I invest in some books or are on-line sites good enough? |
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I'm not sure there's any such thing as "general translation", particularly in a large language pair like French to English, and you will inevitably end up requiring some kind of specialist knowledge, or indeed may have such knowledge already.
I'm not sure I can offer advice as to which resources you'll need to acquire; your needs should become apparent as you do more work.
I can highly recommend joining a translators' association (in your case, probably the SFT or the ITI, or both) and joining language-based networks and forums - discussion with real people as to how terms should be translated beats dictionaries, in most cases.
Although dictionaries can offer very valuable guidance, I would hazard that most translators are working above the level where they require general bilingual dictionaries frequently. Specialist resources are another matter...
[Edited at 2012-02-01 16:35 GMT]
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karen henry
France
Local time: 04:20
Member (2011)
French to English
TOPIC STARTER |
Thanks for all of your advice.
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Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2009)
French to English
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| | Reverso cut down version? | Feb 2 |
Texte Style wrote:
It's years since I had a Robert-Collins, but I just checked Reverso which seems to be connected with Collins, and even the full list of possibilities did not include anything apart from "different"
Maybe a Robert-Collins owner might like to check their paper or CD version? |
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I think Reverso (and other sites) licence an abridged version of Robert-Collins. For what it's worth, the unabridged version does list the use that is equivalent "various".
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Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 03:20
Member (2009)
French to English
+ ...
| | Looking words up... | Feb 2 |
Angela Dickson wrote:
I have the CD version of the full Collins-Robert and it does contain "various" as a translation of "différent" - but surely I can't be alone in thinking that a decent French to English translator (as I'm sure you are, Texte Style, don't get me wrong) doesn't actually need a dictionary to tell him/her that "différent" can sometimes be translated as "various"?
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It's also a good example of how looking *ANY* word up in a dictionary is a first step to give you inspiration/start your thought process, but it isn't a substitute for putting your brain in gear.
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