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 | A Unique Medium—The Flip Side by Gabe Bokor |
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Index 1997-99 |
| Translator Profiles | |
| Correct Science + Elegant Wording = Smiling Client by S. Edmund Berger, Dr. Chem. |
| The Profession | |
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| The Bottom Line by Fire Ant & Worker Bee |
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| Translation Contracts |
| Non-English Computing | |
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| Use of “Virtual” Texts and HTML in Transliteration by Michael Walker |
| Translator Education | |
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| Translation Studies at a Crossroads by Maj-Britt Holljen |
| Biomedical Translation | |
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Immunology—a Brief Overview, Part 3 by Lúcia M. Singer, Ph.D. |
| Science & Technology | |
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| A Translator’s Guide to Organic Chemical Nomenclature XIV by Chester E. Claff, Jr., Ph.D. |
| Banking and Finance | |
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| Going Broke in Brazil by Danilo Nogueira |
| Caught in the Web | |
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Web Surfing for Fun and Profit by Cathy Flick, Ph.D. |
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Terminology Search on the Worldwide Web by Gabe Bokor |
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Translators’ On-Line Resources by Gabe Bokor |
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Translators’ Events |
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Letters to the Editor |
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Call for Papers |
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Terminology Search by Gabe Bokor
The World-Wide Web (WWW) is a huge potpourri of business advertising, serious scholarship, pornography, political propaganda, scam artistry, and many other things. No authority has ever prepared a card system for the millions of sites or imposed any standard of quality for posting information on the Web. Yet it is easier to find even a single word on the WWW than in the best-organized library. While experienced web surfers may have their favorite specialized sites and on-line glossaries (Cathy Flick’s column lists a number of them in each issue of the Translation Journal), the usual point of departure for most research, including terminology research for translation, is one of the many Web search engines.
Yahoo! can be used even if you don’t have a specific key word. Just select the major category and go narrowing your field until you reach the area you’re interested in. For example, if you wish to know more about automobiles that use non-polluting fuels, you can go to Science-Engineering, then Automobiles, and then Alternative Fuel Vehicles, which will finally take you to Solar Vehicles, Electric Vehicles, and Hybrid Vehicles. AltaVista is the other extreme of the search engine spectrum. It is ideal when you want to find the use of an obscure term or abbreviation. It is my personal favorite, although you can occasionally be overwhelmed by the number of hits you get, not all of which relevant to your search. One nice feature of AltaVista is that it can select the language of the page. When I was trying to find the English equivalent of the German word Warenkunde, I knew that there was no exact, generally used term for the same concept. So I searched Warenkunde among the English-language pages, and I actually found the personal page of a professor of Warenkunde, whose title on his English-language page was given both in German and in English, the latter as Professor of Commodity Science. The same feature also came in handy when I tried to confirm the use of the English terms “benchmark” and “benchmarking” in Portuguese. Searching for benchmark or benchmark* in AltaVista’s Advanced Mode among Portuguese sites, I got 1044 hits. It is interesting to note that not all of the texts found used the term in the computer context, but none (of those I checked) bothered to provide a translation in the vernacular. I also confirmed that both words are used in the masculine gender, which is not to be taken for granted, considering that marca is feminine in Portuguese, and the adopted foreign word often assumes the gender of its Portuguese cognate or equivalent. For example, the word Internet is feminine because rede (network) is feminine in Portuguese. A note is in order about searching for phrases like Federal Reserve Board as opposed to words. In most engines, if you just type in the phrase, you get all the sites where any of the words occurs. To restrict your search, you must either put your key phrase in quotation marks or use the Advanced Option of the search engine, which either allows you to use Boolean operators AND, OR, NEAR, NOT, or gives you a menu selection to achieve the same result. Obviously, searching for “Defense Department” (with the quotation marks) will only bring up the exact phrase as typed. Typing Defense Department (without the quotation marks) will give you pages where either of the two words occurs in any context. defense and department under advanced (Boolean) search will yield pages where both words occur, for example, Defense Attorney on line 3 and Justice Department on line 54. defense near department will yield pages with Defense Department, Department of Defense, and probably a few irrelevant sites where the two words happen to be near each other. You must select your search strategy according to the specific case at hand and the result you wish to achieve. Excite is one search engine that claims to be context-sensitive; i.e., if you enter car, it will also find sites where only the words automobile or motor vehicle occur. Most search engines are not case-sensitive. Punctuation marks, including hyphens, and “stop words” such as and, or, is, for, etc. are ignored unless they are part of a phrase between quotation marks. Word fragments can be searched with some engines using the asterisk (*) as a wildcard. For example, searching for annelat* (to find occurrences of annelate, annelated or annelating, AltaVista yielded 261 hits, Yahoo! 32 hits, and both Excite and Infoseek 0 hits. Abbreviations are easily found on the Web. When a large number of irrelevant hits occur or the expansion of the abbreviation is not immediately found, the search can be narrowed by specifying the language (with AltaVista) or using the known or suspected portion of the abbreviation with Boolean operators. For example, knowing that the first letter in the Portuguese abbreviation IPMF stands for imposto (tax), searching AltaVista in the Advanced mode for IPMF and imposto yielded 68 hits, many of which expanded the abbreviation as Imposto Provisório sobre a Movimentação Financeira. The order in which the search engines list the hits is usually random. Excite does it by what it considers order of relevance, even giving percentage of relevance figures, but I’ve found this order to have little to do with the actual relevance of the sites found. Once you’re on a page that, according to the search engine, contains the word or expression you’re looking for, it’s easy to find it on the page. Just type Ctrl-F (Command-F on the Macintosh), and you get a search dialog which allows you to find the string (word, phrase, or fragment) on the page. You can also use the Find in Page (Netscape) or Find (on this page) options under the Edit menu. In doing terminology research using the search engines, you can find the sites where a given term is used (and possibly its meaning clarified); less frequently, you can find the translation of the term as in bilingual or multilingual sites “Rosetta Stones” (such as those listed in Cathy Flick’s column) or in cases like the one mentioned above with Warenkunde. You can also confirm or disqualify your guess of a term. For example, if you’re not sure whether the German word Ventilhub in the automobile context is actually valve stroke, you can search for the latter to find that the 77 occurrences (in AltaVista) all refer to non-automotive context. Valve lift, on the other hand, gives you 799 hits, most of them in the automotive context. Using the search engines, you can find not only individual words, but the type of lingo in which those words are used by those who work in that particular field. What I would not recommend is letting AltaVista’s Translate machine translation utility do your translation. The sample below is the actual translation, including unedited punctuation, of the first sentence of an Italian web page, performed by AltaVista’s machine translation software Babelfish. A (fairly literal) human translation is attached for comparison.
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If the major search engines don’t give you the information you need, you can use them to access other, regional or specialized, search engines such as the Brazilian Cadê, the European EuroSeek, the Japanese Info Navigator, the Russian search engines listed in Cathy Flicks column in this issue of the TJ, or the Medical Search Engine. There is at least one for each need, taste, language, or specialty. | ||||||
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