22:12 Jan 2 

You've got a good point there!

22:05 Jan 2 

can be trusted implicitly. Otherwise machine translation would be impeccable. Which it obviously isn't. We'd all be out of work as well.

18:26 Jan 2 

I totally agree with you. These sites are useful, but I never solely rely on them, as I get the feeling that a great number of translations have been done by people like me, or worse. You've said it yourself, more often than not, a high-quality translation takes time.

18:06 Jan 2 

I don't think so, Helen. There's a link to the translation, but no way of knowing who did it. I think the best way to use those sites is to look at the translations and see if they occur in the same context as what you're looking for, and also see how many times the same translation comes up independently. After that, you can take the translated phrase in question, and google it to see how it shows up in other documents. Ultimately, the translator has to have sufficient knowledge of the subject matter to make the right choice. It can be time consuming though, and when you're working on a translation, it can be helpful to have other people at least begin the legwork for you. Of course, it's ideal to have input from an 'expert,' but that's not always possible.

17:25 Jan 2 

Although I occasionally visit iate.europa.eu and linguee.com, and they are sometimes useful when I find myself in a difficult situation. I can't say I trust these sites implicitly. Is there any way of saying bilingual lawyers and economists, etc. are responsible for the translations?