Regular blog readers and site users will already know I recently divided the Useful Links & Resources for Translators & Interpreters page into five distinct sections. Today I’d like to share with you my three favourite links in each of those sections. They’re basically the ones I use the most.
Let’s start with the first section, General Dictionaries and Glossaries, currently divided into five categories.
The Useful Links & Resources for Translators & Interpreters page on my blog is by far the most popular with almost 9,500 views so far. I’ve been working on it in recent weeks, adding some new links that I’ve come across over the past few months. Some of you may have noticed that the clickable ‘Back to top’ hasn’t been working. For some unknown reason, every time I add anything to the page, all the ‘Back to tops’ stop functioning and I have to fix the coding one by one. They should all be working properly again now.
Among the scores of posts published on translation blogs every day, very few manage to reach out and grab my full attention as much as Kevin Fernandez’s on The Open Mic. Provocatively entitled Why I Don’t Use Bilingual Dictionaries and Why You Shouldn’t Either, I knew I wasn’t going to agree with the content before I even started reading it. And although he softens the initial impact of his title by assuring us that he isn’t actually advocating that “we should never use them”, the beast had already been unleashed, sending everyone scurrying off to defend their respective corners.
I can appreciate that excessive use of a bilingual dictionary as a prop without exploring whether its suggestions are appropriate for the context in question is not helpful. This is especially true if you are a language student trying to get to grips with the intricacies of a language. But giving impressionable young professional translators the idea that it is wrong to even use a bilingual dictionary for their work is counterproductive.
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