Thursday, May 04, 2006

Googling Within a Site

One thing I'm frequently asked to do is to make sure the translation I'm doing or editing is consistent with the fairly large corpus of literature in the customer's web site.

Some of the consistency checking I can take care of by checking previous translation memories, or glossaries (if they exist), and some using the search functions within the site itself.

However, using the search box provided within a site is often not enough. A technique that I find very useful in these cases is to google within the site.

Say for example that I need to see within the Italian portion of my customer whether in the past they have used more often "implementazione dell'applicazione" or "deployment dell'applicazione".

If my customer's Italian web site is, for example http://www.xyz.com/IT, I just need to enter in the google search box
"deployment dell'applicazione" site:http://www.xyz.com/IT
and then repeat the operation for
"implementazione dell'applicazione" site:http://www.xyz.com/IT
Both searches will be limited to the customer's Italian web site, and the google search results could give me a good idea of the relative frequency of the terms used.

4 comments:

  1. Google can help you finding the meaning of words that you can’t find anywhere in the dictionary. If you the word you are looking for in the search bar and hit Enter, you will – if you are lucky - find numerous results that would give you at least ideas about what the word or phrase actually means. Indeed, Google makes human translation much easier to work with. It is important to keep in mind however, that Google is not infallible. Looking at funny pictures on the internet might as well distract you from getting your actual work done.

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  2. Thanks for your tips.
    Adding to the comment above, I just wanted to also mention the importance of checking the source of information when researching terms on Google. Frequency of use is not enough, especially when we look for specialized terms.

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  3. Thank you this article helped me a lot. Indeed google is a good tool to find anything but we have to always double check.

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