Linguee
Linguee is a unique dictionary and translation search engine that combines a vast editorial dictionary with a search function for translated example sentences from the web. It helps users understand context and usage for words and phrases.
Price: Free
Description
Linguee serves as a hybrid dictionary and translation memory, designed to provide contextual translations by searching through billions of professionally translated texts, primarily from institutional websites, patents, and academic papers. Unlike traditional machine translation, Linguee doesn't translate new text directly but rather helps users find how specific words or phrases have been translated by humans in real-world contexts. It's especially valuable for professional translators, linguists, and anyone needing to understand the nuances of a word's usage in different contexts.
Linguee stands out by offering a powerful reference tool that prioritizes human-translated examples, making it superior for idiomatic expressions and specialized terminology where direct machine translation might fail.
How to Use
1.Go to the Linguee website.
2.Select your source and target languages using the dropdown menus (e.g., English to German).
3.Type the word, phrase, or idiom you want to look up into the search bar.
4.Press Enter or click the search icon.
5.The results page will display dictionary entries with definitions and automatically generated example sentences from reliable sources, showing the word in context.
6.Review the example sentences to understand the usage and choose the most appropriate translation.
Use Cases
Finding contextual translations for words/phrasesImproving translation accuracy for professional linguistsLearning idiomatic expressionsResearching specialized terminologyUnderstanding nuances of language usage
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Provides contextual translations with real-world examples
- Excellent for understanding idiomatic expressions and specialized terminology
- Completely free to use with no ads
- High-quality, human-translated example sentences from reliable sources
- Offers dictionary definitions alongside contextual examples
Cons
- Does not translate entire sentences or documents directly
- Limited language pairs compared to full machine translation services
- Can be slower to find specific phrases if no direct match exists in its corpus
Pricing
Linguee: Free for all users.
FAQs