Where have the dictionary and glossary links gone?

A bit of history

Back in the mid 1990s, the Internet was a much smaller place and decent Italian-English translation resources were hard to come by. So when I set up my web site in 1996, I put my own personal Italian-English technical glossary on-line to attract visitors. During the years that followed the worldwide web grew and developed, and more highly specialized and complete works gradually began to spring up. I therefore decided to withdraw my humble offering and replace it with an organized list of resources.

The Internet is – as everyone knows – an ever changing place, and new glossaries are born and die every day. Lists like mine therefore need constant maintenance, which was fine while I used it myself to solve my own terminology problems, but as the speed of Internet connections increased and my knowledge of search methods improved, it became quicker and more efficient to use more direct techniques to find terms. So my list fell into disuse and started to fill with dead wood.

That's all well and good, but what do I do if I want to find a dictionary/glossary?

I would hate to leave visitors empty-handed, which is after all why I posted my list on the Internet in the first place. So here is how to find what you are looking for (if it exists) using a common-or-garden search engine and advanced search methods.

Suppose you are looking for a glossary of Italian wine terms. First of all you have to choose the best keywords for the search. The most obvious word is wine, but if we want to make sure the glossary deals with Italian wines, we should also add a word we expect to find in such a glossary, such as Chianti, for example.

Next we should choose a word or words which lead us to a glossary rather than just a web page which mentions Italian wines. It is fairly certain that a glossary (or dictionary) will describe itself as such, so the next keyword is quite clearly glossary (or dictionary). This is however where we run into our first problem: the default operator of all major search engines is AND and what we are looking for will probably describe itself as either a glossary or a dictionary, but not both. The solution to the problem is actually in that last sentence itself. All we have to do is type in glossary OR dictionary, preferably in brackets if the search engine supports them.
However there is still a fair chance that our results will include pages which happen to mention Italian wines and a dictionary. The solution to this is to limit the search for the keywords glossary and dictionary (not to mention vocabulary and lexicon) to the parts of the web page which are most likely to contain a description of the contents of the page itself, in other words the page title and URL. We can do this by entering intitle:glossary OR intitle:dictionary OR inurl:glossary OR inurl:dictionary, again preferably in brackets. Notice there are no spaces around the colons.

If we are looking for a bilingual Italian-English glossary, a good trick is to cross the languages. For example, choose wine as one of the keywords, but pick glossario instead of glossary, or choose glossary, but pick vino instead of wine.

In a nutshell, the best expression to use in our favourite search engine in order to find an on-line Italian-English wine glossary/dictionary is something like:

…perhaps throwing in (a drop of) Chianti for good measure.

Do I seriously have to type in miles of text just to find a glossary?

I admit the idea of entering a string as long as the example above each time you need to find a glossary is a little daunting, but luckily technology comes to our rescue, in the form of the freeware tool IntelliWebSearch.

IntelliWebSearch allows you to save long tails of code, such as intitle:glossary OR intitle:dictionary OR intitle:vocabulary…, and add them to your search when needed. Actually it is even more powerful than that. In practice all you have to do is select the word wine (or vino) in any application and hit a convenient shortcut to launch the search in your browser automatically. IntelliWebSearch can also be configured to look up single terms in the on-line glossary once you have found it, and can even do likewise in local resources (dictionaries on CD-ROM or your hard drive).

Other types of search

As I mentioned before, I now only occasionally search for terms and their translations by first finding a glossary and then looking them up. Over the years I have developed techniques to:

• search for parallel texts;
• search for single terms;
• search for abbreviations/acronyms;
• check terms/expressions;
• search for quotations/titles;
• search for idioms.
  

I give a full explanation of the methods I use in my on-line training webinar entitled IntelliWebSearching - Optimal Internet Search Techniques for Translators.

The 'web' is the limit

I started out by offering an on-line Italian-English technical glossary with a limited number of entries, which I later replaced with an organized, but limited, list of specialist glossaries and dictionaries. Now I am offering a freeware search tool for translators and terminologists and a bit of search know-how, which in theory will allow you to solve an unlimited number of terminology problems.
Come back again in a few years' time to see if I have done even better!