Translex Publishing

Just recently, I was asked to write a short review on the new technical dictionaries by Graham P. Oxtoby entitled Groot Woordenboek Industrie & Techniek. I'm fortunate enough to have purchased a subscription to these two online dictionaries after first consulting the older Kluwer's dictionaries in a bookshop and asking the author for a free preview before committing to a subscription. The free preview period quickly resulted in an online subscription.

The new online dictionaries are clearly better than any othertechnical dictionaries I've ever used for Dutch, including those by Kluwer (which were actually compiled and edited by the same author back in 1993). I was astounded by the wealth of terms contained in the new dictionaries. The dictionaries contain terms you simply won't find in other dictionaries, not even in the Jansonius or Ernst dictionaries (by Brandstetter) which are considered as excellent works of reference. As a mechanical engineer I was particularly interested in how the corpus relates to my own field, as well as new technologies. I can't say that I found every term that I looked for in these dictionaries but no dictionary can contain all terms. However, after mastering the online filter option I was always pointed in the right direction for alternative terms. The translations that I found were always very reliable and also repesentative of the terminology used in the industry. A dictionary can never contain every term in a given field, but this online version comes very close to meeting that objective. I understand that a dictionary of this magnitude is not easy to compile and that this can take many years of research to complete. Nor is it easy to claim that a dictionary contains most terms you'd need as a translator.

Dictionary compilation is an ongoing process and this is what I like about these new dictionaries - they are continually updated and extended on a weekly basis. When I first subscribed in January 2011, the dictionaries contained 124,000 entries. They now have more than 160,000 NE-EN entries. You can even interact with the editors and recommend new additions or point out any errors that you may come across (no dictionary is perfect!). The EN-NE version can also be used to research the German equivalents in other resources on the internet. I found this very practical when comparing the Dutch source terms with the German counterparts in the Ernst dictionaries. As far as my own field is concerned, the terms and phrases I checked and found were both reliable and verifiable. The only problem I sometimes had with the dictionaries was the field labelling. Although reliable, some terms are labelled for other fields (like welding, metallurgy etc.) so you won't always find the right term if you use a restricted search filter (e.g. only on mechanical engineering). You need to do a global search with the use of wildcards. You can also switch languages, which is very helpful.

This dictionary was by far the best investment I made in the past year. The online database enables me to log in any time of the day or night, 7 days a week. As long as I have an internet connection, there's not a lot that can go wrong. Nor is there any need for me to buy hardback dictionaries that are quickly outdated. I think the price is just about right, too. Why invest in expensive hardbacks when you can consult these dictionaries online and directly from your desktop. I don't think there's another set of technical dictionaries available with this many terms and translations.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect solution to my translation problems as a patent reviewer. I can therefore highly recommend these dictionaries to anyone engaged in technical translation work - you won't be disappointed. The author has done an excellent job!
by John David Templar MSc.