Linguee is the right word for good translations

Google has a neat trick in its Chrome browser of spotting web pages displayed in foreign languages and offering to translate them, then doing so instantly and in reasonable fashion.

But Linguee, launched on Wednesday in five languages, does a better job when it comes to grasping context and finding just the right word for the occasion.

Linguee is more online dictionary than translation service. Its relevance and accuracy is achieved by indexing millions of online translations produced by real people.

You can see through its interface how translators have taken a phrase or word in English, for example, and translated it into German in its particular context of, say, a paragraph from a legal document or business news report.

A pie-chart indicator shows how frequently one translation occurs compared to others, helping to narrow down the most appropriate phrase.

I found it useful for not only getting the right individual word for the context, but also for finding the comparable idiom for something like “pot calling the kettle black”.

Linguee is based in Cologne, Germany and launched in beta in German and English last year. Today, it is adding Spanish, French and Portuguese comparisons with English, with plans to add Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Italian next year.

“Professional linguists and translators themselves find this useful and are a target market,” Leo Fink, Linguee co-founder, told me.

While the basic service is free and supported by advertising, he anticipates these professionals paying a subscription fee in future for special adaptations of Linguee.

In the meantime, free tools (Werkzeuge, herramientas, outils, ferramentas seem to be the appropriate translations) such as Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-ins and a Mac dashboard widget, are offered.