Sylang News

We are likely to find on the web dictionaries and glossaries about even the most specific topic. For example, typing "french wine dictionary" or "french wine dictionary grand cru" in Google will reveal several glossaries of wine-related terms.

We need however to pay special attention to the quality of web resources. Institutions such as the EU, governmental agencies, or universities can usually be trusted in their areas of competency: for administrative terms, diplomas equivalence, legal terms, etc.
For other sources, it is always necessary to check whether the term found is used in the expected context in the target language. Again a web search will do. If the search returns very few relevant documents containing the proposed term, this term is probably not correct. Incidently, this is how Google detects spelling mistakes.

You can also search past translations.

Posted by Sylang Support at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may occasionally receive requests asking you to translate emails in which the sender says he is interested in bidding for an eBay auction or buying a product, but for whatever reason asks if the goods can be shipped to Nigeria or Ivory Coast.

This is a frequent type of internet fraud aimed at getting people to send money or goods they will never get paid for. Although this is not your primary goal as a translator, please advise anyone asking you for that kind of translations that this is almost certainly a fraud. Such messages are often written in incorrect English or French.

Posted by Sylang Support at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you would like to share your experience, translation tips, etc. with other translators, please email us your text and we will publish it here. You may either write in French or English.

Posted by Sylang Support at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may occasionally receive mails from Sylang Quality Control suggesting improvements to a particular translation you did. If this happens to you, please remember it is your responsibility to reply again to the original request, incorporating any changes.

Posted by Sylang Support at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Il est tres souvent possible de trouver plusieurs expressions dont la signification est identique, mais lesquelles de ces expressions sont vraiment utilisees en anglais ?
Le web est pour cela une formidable base de connaissance et une verification simple est d'utiliser un moteur de recherche comme Google dont la page d'accueil en anglais est a l'adresse

http://www.google.com/webhp

Vous pouvez alors comparer le nombre de reponses (en haut de page a droite). A savoir aussi, sur Google un lien vers la definition des terme recherches apparait egalement en haut de page a droite.

Lorsque vous recherchez une expression plutot qu'un simple mot, utilisez des guillemets pour n'obtenir que les resultats contenant l'expression exacte.

Posted by at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some useful sites to find the meaning of a term, acronym, or abbreviation in English:

http://www.dictionary.com
http://www.answers.com
http://www.acronymfinder.com
and of course our own English-French and French-English dictionary.

Some valuable French-language bilingual dictionaries and terminology databases:

http://www.granddictionnaire.com/ is a valuable resource, although slow and awkward to use.

http://europa.eu.int/eurodicautom/Controller is very useful to find official and normalized translations. This EU resource is unfortunately being phased out.

Posted by at 05:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)