Linguee and the new ways of translation

Abstract

The new ways in which translations are carried out (Cronin 2010), and the new documentation procedures (Corpas 2004) in the technological paradigm are reflected in the tools and resources translators use (Lagoudaki 2006 and Désilets et al 2009). Linguee is a repository of translations made by humans that are aligned together with their source text; it collects content from multilingual web sites, through a highly automated procedure; finally, it uses aligned corpus in order to extract terminology and compile dictionaries. Though the use of parallel texts in translation, as a decision-making procedure, might give rise to suspicion, we contribute with arguments that could justify their use. We will prove that Linguee, at least at a macrostructural level, complies with the quality criteria proposed by Pinto (2004-2011). Also, we will identify some mechanisms that can contribute to quality in Linguee, such as peer-review, human review and history of editions in dictionary entries, traceability of content, as well as collaborative edition that can refine the aligned texts obtained from searches.