DGT Glossary terms incorporated into text translator

When you use the French translator tool, appropriate results will now be displayed from the DGT glossaries. The DGT glossaries contain terms of translations from various technical fields.

French-English text translation tool

An initial version of this site's automatic French/English translation tool is available. The tool is designed to complement the site's dictionary as follows:

• The dictionary is intended for use by students, learners, translators etc who basically understand some French but need to find out about the translation or uses of an isolated word or phrase;
• The translation tool is aimed more at English speakers who need to get the gist of an entire French text (or vice versa for French speakers with an English text), typically when they understand very little of the target language.

In practice, initial tests show that learners and users of the language are also finding it useful to look up phrases using the translation tool. You should just be aware of limitations of the automatic translation, and may like to take a look at the accompanying tips on using machine translation.

About the translation system

Many of the text translations are produced by Google Translate, a statistical machine translation system developed by Google which allows sites such as this to query and build on the translation system. However, this site's tool also builds some additional features on top of the Google system:

• it is assumed that the language pair you are working with is French/English; the site will detect which of these two languages is being entered and translate to the other language;
• some orthographic corrections are made to the input text which help to get a better result from Google;
• in some cases, alternative inputs will be run simultaneously through the Google system when such inputs are known to improve the translation results (such alternatives and their translations are always listed alongside the original query);
• in some cases, instead of using the Google system, a translation is pulled directly from this site's dictionary data. Note that the source of the translation is always clearly indicated.

The above features are being actively improved on the basis of the typical use to which users are putting the system.

Known limitations

The system works best on texts that are similar to the types of text that the system has been trained on. Google Translate is a statistical system, trained on sets of existing translations. In practice, this means the system works well on "the types of text that people tend to translate". For example, whole sentences or passages from commercial or technical texts work quite well. Isolated words and phrases, particularly when they have a "dangling" word such as a preposition, sometimes don't work as well. You may also find what you consider to be quite a "basic" phrase or question doesn't translate so well, because a phrase used in everyday speech didn't crop up in the material that the translation system was trained on.

French audio trial in phrasebook section

A new audio feature is being trialled in the French phrasebook section of the site. The audio is currently available on the following pages:

• French greetings
• Basic French adjectives
• People and family members

On these pages, you can listen to the computer pronounce the various words and phrases. If feedback from this trial proves positive, then similar audio will be added to other phrasebook sections and other parts of the site.

Dictionary update: DGT glossary beta

Along with its sister Spanish dictionary and language site, entries in this site's on-line French dictionary have now been augmented with terms from the EU DGT Multilingual Translation Memory. The latter is a set of translated terms, phrases and sentences extracted from translations of EU documents. It thus covers translation of various legal and technical domains. At present, approximately 30,000 terms and phrases are included on this site. (Some long or repetitious entries have been filtered out.)

The terms from the DGT glossary currently appear in a table below the regular dictionary entries. At present, they are included for French-English lookups only, but it is planned that terms for English-French lookups will be added over the next few days.