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RE: Do you still use traditional dictionaries?
| Originally written by Maxi Schwarz-Bastami on December 30, 2011 8:35 PM
| Originally written by Irina Brüning on December 30, 2011 9:19 AM
When I was in university, we were only allowed to use monolingual dictionaries when doing translations (yes, even for translations into the foreign language!) That's why I became very used to them and I think they are still useful for me, especially the Petit Robert for french, you find all meanings of a word there. I also use bilingual paper dictionaries and online dictionaries, sometimes more and sometimes less, it depends on the job.
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Irina, what was their reasoning?
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I studied Romanistik (italian and french) and translation was not the most important part of the curriculum. In the few translation courses we had they wanted to teach us the foreign language in a hard way, I guess , it was not supposed to be too easy. I think you can't translate everything with just a monolingual dictionary to help you (for example, if you don't know the name of a plant or an animal the description will not help you), but they give you a kind of "freedom" to find the right word in the target language, bilingual dictionaries can be quite restrictive.
Our teacher of translation de>fr warned us about using bilingual dictionaries too much because in this way, you risk to translate the sentences word by word and not as a whole. I think his point of view influenced me and helped me.
Happy new year to all of you!
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