Just a quickie this month, as the dust settles after a flooding/stampede/birthday extravaganza round our house. (That will mean little to those of you who aren’t members of my family or residents of Calgary, but suffice to say it’s been non-stop around here since the end of June).
In my last post I mentioned a number of online resources I use for work when I’m away from the “office”. I actually use many of them when I’m “in the office” too, as a complement to my paper dictionaries and reference books. I thought you might be interested to hear about ones I find particularly useful, in case they can be helpful to you too, so here they are (along with a couple other useful sites):
Monolingual language resources
www.merriam-webster.com (American English dictionary)
www.oxforddictionaries.com (British English dictionary)
www.thesaurus.com (self-explanatory!)
www.diccionarios.com (Spanish monolingual – as well as multilingual – dictionary. Limited number of searches allowed without an account)
British National Corpus (Corpus of British English usage)
Corpus of Contemporary American English (the American English counterpart to the BNC)
Multilingual language resources
www.wordreference.com (dictionary for major European and Asian languages)
Proz Term Search (dictionary in the form of members’ contributions or answers to translation questions, in tons of languages!)
www.linguee.com (again collected from individuals’ translations; often unreliable, but useful for double-checking)
LEO (major European languages and Chinese into or out of German only)
And of course, our dear friend Google (don’t forget you can try Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.com.mx etc. to get country-specific results, and Google Scholar is invaluable for academic and technical vocabulary)
[I was going to put the EU multilingual term base on here (IATE), but it likes to freeze my computer too much, so I can only say use with caution!]
File access and transfer
Dropbox I’m sure everyone’s heard of Dropbox by now. It’s amazingly easy to store files for use on other devices/computers, or to give other people access to several files or large files without filling up their inboxes.
Hightail (formerly yousendit, I used to use this before I got Dropbox. This is still useful to use with people who don’t have a Dropbox account.)
I’d love it if you would leave in the comments any websites you use that I haven’t mentioned here.
‘Til next time!
