Italian and English installable or online dictionaries

I first wrote about the Italian bilingual and monolingual dictionaries available online some eighteen years ago. Since, however, such links are liable to change, with old sites disappearing and new ones taking their place, below is an up-to-date list of sites that offer English-Italian, Italian monolingual, and other Italian bilingual dictionaries.

• Picchi’s English-Italian dictionary (published by Hoepli) is available for free from La Repubblica website: Dizionari - La Repubblica. The same site also offers the Grande Dizionario di Italiano Hoepli and Hoepli’s Dizionario dei sinonimi.
• The current incarnation of the excellent Sansoni English-Italian dictionary (published by Rizzoli) is available online at the Corriere della Sera website: Dizionari e Traduttori - Corriere della Sera. The same web page also offers several other Italian monolingual dictionaries, like the Dizionario dei modi di dire and a Dizionario di citazioni, and Italian-Spanish, Italian-French and Italian-German and Latin-Italian bilingual dictionaries.
• The venerable Hazon English-Italian dictionary is available from the Garzanti website: Garzanti Linguistica, where you can also find Garzanti’s Italian monolingual dictionary and an Italian-French bilingual dictionary.
• The English-Italian bilingual dictionary I’m currently using most often is Ragazzini’s. You can subscribe to it on Zanichelli’s site (Dizionari online Zanichelli). From the same site you can subscribe to several other dictionaries, including Zingarelli (Italian monolingual), several specialized English-Italian bilingual dictionaries, and other bilingual dictionaries including Italian-Spanish, Italian-French, Italian-German, Italian-Russian, Italian-Arabic, Italian-Modern Greek, Italian-Chinese and Italian Japanese.
• Oxford-Paravia Concise English-Italian dictionary is available as a (paid) subscription from the MobySystems website.
• WordReference.com offers free access to a useful English-Italian dictionary, as well as several other online dictionaries.
• The eLexico.com website offers a wide range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, either via online subscriptions (generally more expensive than those available from Zanichelli), downloadable installable dictionaries, or both things combined. Among the dictionaries downloadable from eLexico.com are Picchi, Sansoni, and many others; unfortunately, the excellent Italian monolingual Devoto-Oli is no longer available for individual subscription, though it is offered for multi-user subscriptions.
• While the bilingual dictionaries offered by eLexico include Marolli’s Grande Dizionario Tecnico Inglese, it is cheaper to buy it as a Windows app from this link.
• Lexicool.com lets the user search many dictionaries. You can find Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as many other linguistical resources. 
• The Treccani website offers access to the Enciclopedia italiana online, to the Italian language Vocabolario, and to a good Italian synonyms dictionary. 
• Il Nuovo De Mauro is a very useful Italian monolingual dictionary and can be consulted for free online.
• Francesco Urzì’s indispensable Dizionario delle Combinazioni Lessicali is available as a (paid) online resource. 
• Finally, for those of us who try to resist the tide of useless, redundant (and often misleading and incorrect) anglicisms in Italian, Antonio Zoppetti offers il dizionario delle Alternative agli Anglicismi, significati e sinonimi in italiano.

WordWeb Pro: dictionary and multi-search application

A few posts ago, in my article on Reverso Context, I mentioned several multi-search applications from which Reverso could be called. One of these, the one I use the most, is WordWeb Pro.

WordWeb Pro is chiefly a dictionary: in its free version (more about that, and its unusual licensing terms, later) it comes with a large English language dictionary that offers synonyms, antonyms, other useful features such as subordinate and superordinate categories, the ability to restrict searches to a specific grammatical category and to search, from within the program, also Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

WordWeb Pro

The Pro version adds optional dictionaries, for example the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Chambers Thesaurus, the New Oxford American Dictionary and several others (but you have to buy them separately). It also allows adding your own glossaries, adding terms and definitions to the main dictionary, and adding searches from many online dictionary and search engines. I've added, for example, the Microsoft Language Portal, Google Advance Search, Linguee, Reverso Context, the WordReference EN-IT and several other specialized monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.

WordWeb Pro's tabs—with the dictionaries and searches I use

The full list of features is too long for a short article, but they include:

• Thesaurus and dictionary for Windows 
• Customizable hotkey, which allows instant look up from almost any program 
• Restricting the search for synonyms and antonyms by part of speech
• Full text search (so you can search within the definitions)
• Adding your own glossaries 
• Using various patterns and wildcards in searches (useful when you are looking for a word but you aren’t sure how to spell it) 
• X-Ref button to extend the search to other dictionaries installed on the computer 
• Adding new words or sets of words with their definitions and usage examples to the dictionary 
• Importing and exporting the added terms to common spreadsheet-format files 
• Bookmarks (for example, to remember past searches: useful to keep track of which words and terms most often give you problems) 
• Replace button to substitute a synonym in a document you are editing 
• Possibility of using the tool without the need to be online (for the installed dictionaries only: you need to be online to use the web search).

I use WordWeb in two different ways: to quickly search its main dictionary and thesaurus, and as a multi-search tool that allows me searching several dictionaries and websites all at the same time.

To add a new search site to WordWeb Pro, follow this procedure:

1. Go to the Options menu
2. Select Dictionary tabs...
   The Dictionary tabs window opens
3. In the Dictionary tabs Window, click the “New” button
   The Web reference window opens
4. Give a name to the new web reference (the new search), and add its URL (web address), using “%s” as a placeholder for the search term.

So, for example, to add Google, you put “Google” as the name of the search engine and “https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q=%s” as the search strings.

How to add a new search engine in WordWeb Pro

The best way to find where to put your placeholder in the URL is to perform a search and then examine the URL of the retrieved page to see where the search string goes. So, for example, to see which URL I needed to add, I searched for the word “test” in Google. Google converted that to the URL https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q=test and I then replaced “test” with the placeholder “%s” in that URL, to get the search string to use in WordWeb.

WordWeb Pro allows adding dozens of search engines but the number of tabs provided is limited to twenty-one or so—you can, however, select and deselect the ones you have added depending on which sites you need to search.

If you don't want to pay for WordWeb Pro, you can use WordWeb Free to evaluate the program (minus the Pro features), but if you continue using the free version instead of upgrading to Pro, the requirements to be eligible are fairly peculiar (and eco-friendly): WordWeb Free may be used indefinitely only by people who take no more than two commercial flights (and only one return flight) in any 12-month period—to restrict the free version to people who limit their carbon footprint.

DiCE: Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español

A useful online resource for translators and students of the Spanish language:


DiCE: Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español

Need a dictionary for the next World Cup?

The next World Cup is rapidly approaching. If you need a soccer dictionary to help you translate from English into Portuguese, or from Portuguese into English, one has recently been compiled and published by Humberto Ramos and Rhonda Abigail Bennett Henry-Ramos.

From their presentation:

Our “Bilingual Dictionary of Football (Soccer) Terms in English/Portuguese and Portuguese/English” is available as an e-book on the international market. This publication can be purchased at major online retail stores, such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and can be read on e-readers, computers and smartphones.

Our dictionary contains a vast array of football and football-related words and expressions in English, as well as Brazilian Portuguese. It also provides many pertinent explanations.

The terms present in this publication are used on a daily basis in the world of football (soccer), on and off the field. They are also utilized by the press in their commentaries and analyses of the game.

This bilingual dictionary is, therefore, an excellent tool for football managers, technical staff, football players, journalists, commentators, translators and interpreters, football aficionados, and all persons who will come to Brazil in June 2014 for the biggest world-footballing event.

The new dictionary is available as an e-book for $ 9.99 from Amazon and from Barnes and Noble.

Italian dictionaries

Just a quick note: I've updated the Italian dictionaries online post with additional resources.

Italian dictionaries online

I first wrote about the Italian bilingual and monolingual dictionaries available online some five years ago. Since, however, such links are liable to change, with old sites disappearing and new ones taking their place, here is an up to date list of sites that offer English-Italian, Italian monolingual, and other Italian bilingual dictionaries:

• Picchi's English-Italian dictionary (published by Hoepli) is available for free from La Repubblica website: Dizionari - La Repubblica. The same site also offers the Grande Dizionario di Italiano Hoepli.
• The current incarnation of the excellent Sansoni English-Italian dictionary (published by Rizzoli) is available online at the Corriere della Sera website: Dizionari e Traduttori - Corriere della Sera. The same web page also offers several other Italian monolingual dictionaries and Italian-Spanish, Italian-French and Italian-German bilingual dictionaries.
• The venerable Hazon English-Italian dictionary is available from the Garzanti website: Garzanti Linguistica, where you can also find Garzanti's Italian monolingual dictionary and an Italian-French bilingual dictionary.
• The English-Italian bilingual dictionary I'm currently using most often is Ragazzini's. You can subscribe to it on Zanichelli's site (Dizionari online Zanichelli). From the same site you can subscribe to several other dictionaries, including Zingarelli (Italian monolingual), Tommaseo (a historic Italian monolingual dictionary), several different specialized English-Italian bilingual dictionaries, and other bilingual dictionaries including Italian-Spanish, Italian-French, Italian-German, Italian-Russian and Italian-Albanian.
• Oxford-Paravia Concise English-Italian dictionary is available from the Oxford-Paravia website.
• WordReference.com offers access to two different English-Italian dictionaries: its own and Collins'.
• The eLexico.com website offers a wide range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, either via online subscriptions (generally more expensive than those available from Zanichelli), downloadable installable dictionaries, or both things combined. Among the dictionaries downloadable from eLexico.com are Picchi, Sansoni, the excellent Italian monolingual Devoto-Oli, and many others.
• Lexicool.com lets the user search many different dictionaries. You can find Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as Italian and English monolingual resources (Thanks to Carlotta for the suggestion)
• The Treccani website offers access to the Enciclopedia italiana online, to the Italian language Vocabolario, and to a good Italian synonyms dictionary  (Thanks to Licia for the suggestion)

Update

I've added links to the Lexicool and Treccani sites, thanks to suggestions by Carlotta Saconney and Licia Corbolante.

A truly useful article on the quality of legal dictionaries

R. De Groot and Conrad Van Laer, of Mastrich University, published a few years ago a very useful article: The Quality of Legal Dictionaries: An Assessment.

In this article, De Groot and Van Laer assess the quality of many bilingual and multilingual legal dictionaries for the European Union languages. A truly interesting and useful part of the article is at the beginning, where the authors write some general remarks about translation issues to consider when tackling legal terminology - this is in effect a short but useful course on legal translation.

My thanks to Daniela Zambrini, who pointed this article out in a recent post on ProZ.

Italian electronic dictionaries: an update

Several years ago I had written a couple of posts on the Italian dictionaries available online or on CD:

Patches for Italian dictionaries on CD-Rom

and

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

After almost six years, someone wrote to me today, asking for further advice, since her copy of the Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary no longer worked, even using the suggested patch:

I happily used this dictionary on my XP machine until this morning: when I clicked on it, it opened with the word list but without the definitions as occurred before the patch install. I worked for 2 hours trying everything I could think of, including trying to reinstall the patch.
I have a few questions which I hope you can help me with:

1. Is there a patch for Service Pack 3 for the Sansoni? Would that be the problem? The old patch will not even re-install. It says it cannot find the path....so my reasoning is perhaps it has something to do with Service Pack 3 or some recent upgrade from Microsoft. 

1. I found a site that has a CD ROM Ragazzini 2011 for 50 Euro. Are you familiar with it? If you are, do you like it? Is it also tied to the web as is the Sansoni? I was really hoping that if I have to spring for a new dictionary, it would be complete in itself and not depend on the availability of the Internet or be at the mercy of upgrades of Service Packs and operating systems.

I like the Sansoni because I can search for phrases, for instance on Friday I looked up "beat around the bush" and found the correct phrase to use. The on line dictionaries only allow you to search for a word. I absolutely need a dictionary that can do the phrase search.
To sum it up, I would like to repair the Sansoni if possible and then would definitely be open to buying a new dictionary on CD Rom with these features: not accompanied by a hard copy, one that is stand alone and not tied to the web or updates to computer operations and very importantly, can search for phrases.

I answered my correspondent by e-mail, but since I think this could be of general interest, I’m reposting part of my answers here:


The old Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary (and other dictionaries on CD-Rom based on the same Edigeo software, such as the Picchi English-Italian and the Tam Spanish-Italian) work in Windows 7 without any need for a patch. Using the old patch (available from the Edigeo Web site), they still work - at least on my old XP laptop, which I keep updated with the latest patches from Microsoft, so I don’t think the problem has to do with Microsoft: a more likely explanation is the interference of some other piece of software.
For anybody for whom the old dictionaries no longer work, there are several options available:

1. Upgrade to Windows 7 – your dictionary problems might go away, but you would have to pay for the new OS, and, if your laptop is too old or does not have enough resources, Windows 7 might not run well on it (or not run at all). Also, of course, there is no guarantee that an old dictionary will keep on working – any Windows update might break them.
2. Contact Edigeo: they created the software for Rizzoli-Sansoni, and might be able to help.
3. Instead of trying to get the CD-Rom for the Ragazzini, I suggest instead a subscription to Ragazzini (and maybe some other dictionary: they offer several different general and technical dictionaries) from the Zanichelli online dictionary site. The yearly subscription is cheap: about 10 Euro per dictionary (prices vary depending on the dictionary you are interested in).
   The advantage there is that you always have the most up to date version of the dictionary. The disadvantage, of course, is that when you don’t have access to the Internet you also don’t have access to your dictionary. The Ragazzini online does allow full-text search, so you would still be able to find phrases.
4. From the eLexico.com site you can get a variety of dictionaries as downloads (for about 40 Euros per dictionary), or as online subscriptions (for about 20 Euro/year). Among the dictionaries offered, there is the Sansoni, but they also have Picchi and several other good dictionaries.
5. Rely on the many dictionaries available online for free. I’ll write an update to my old article soon, to see what is now available, and what no longer is.
   Remember, however, that free online dictionaries, even when they offer the full contents of the paid versions, usually limit search to headwords only (no full text search).

Idiomizer: a wiki for idiom translation

I recently received an announcement about Idiomizer, a new wiki site that collects idioms in many languages and their translations into other languages.

According to the announcement,

IDIOMIZER is a translation
reference for idiomatic exchange across languages, absolutely vital
because different cultures use different phrases to impart the same
meaning. One of its many powerful features is the ability to view
multiple languages simultaneously. 

IDIOMIZER seeks the input of translators, linguists
and language lovers worldwide in making the site a useful and enjoyable
tool and we encourage you to register and add to our idioms.

Registration is required, but free. Once you have registered, you can search through the idioms, add new idioms, add translations and definitions, and generally contribute to the site.

Perhaps this is not “absolutely vital”, but it should prove a useful addition to many a translator's toolbox.

How not to create dictionary entries

From Sidney I. Landau, "Dictionaries, The Art and Craft of Lexicography":

Avoid circularity. Since the primary purpose of a dictionary is to inform the reader what words mean, anything that absolutely denies the reader the opportunity to find out the meaning of a word he has looked up is the most serious defect a dictionary can have. Mind you, circularity does not just make things difficult - it makes them impossible. No amount of diligence on the part of the reader can penetrate the barrier of circularity.

From the Michaelis, "Moderno Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa":

despacho
des.pa.cho
sm (der regressiva de despachar) 1 Ação de despachar.

[...]

despachar
des.pa.char
(provençal despachar) vtd 1 Pôr despacho em, deferindo ou indeferindo: Despachar uma petição.

I guess the editors of the Michaelis didn't read Landau, then.

Dictionaries and encyclopedias as search engines

Fabio Said has a post (Installing many dictionaries as Firefox and Internet Explorer add-ons) in fidus interpretes about installing dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference works as search engines in Firefox or other browsers. An excellent tip that I'm sure will prove useful to many of us. Check it out!

Beside the technique suggested by Fabio, you can set up Firebfox (or IE7) so that it opens with several dictionaries, each in its own tab. For example, I have tabs for the Garzanti, Rizzoli and Paravia English-Italian dictionaries, as well as separate tabs for the De Mauro Italian dictionary, for the Simone legal dictionaries, and for the English and Italian Wikipedias.

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

I believe that most, if not all, major EN>IT IT>EN dictionaries are now available on CD-ROM or at least with CD-ROM available (in addition to the paper dictionary).

I don't have a link for the Ragazzini (Zanichelli), but the Picchi (Hoepli), Rizzoli-Larousse "Sansoni" (which, sadly, does not contain the full text of the great Sansoni-Macchi), and Hazon-Garzanti are now available online.

Of the above, I think the best and most complete general English-Italian dictionary nowadays is Picchi's, closely followed by Rizzoli-Sansoni.

You can try them for yourself, using the following links:

• Picchi-Hoepli (register at the site: the dictionary is available even without registration, but only in abbreviated form)


• Rizzoli-Sansoni (the link I provide is to a page on our company's web site: you can obtain the code to add them to your own web page by following this link)


• Hazon-Garzanti.


• Oxford Paravia Concise


• Collins

Using these dictionaries "for free" online is tempting, and occasionally useful. Remember, however, that the CD-ROM versions have some important advantages: faster searches, availability even when you are not online, and additional functionality, (much richer search capability, from full-text searches to the use of boolean operators).

Update

I've added to the body of this post another two online dictionaries, Oxford-Paravia Concise and Collins, which have been suggested by colleagues.

I will probably write a comparison review of these online dictionaries in a future post.

Patches for Italian dictionaries on CD-Rom

Some time ago I bought a new computer, but until yesterday I hadn't needed to use any of my dictionaries on CD-Rom on it.
The operating system of the new computer is XP (SP2): of course, none of my dictionaries was running properly.
I knew that in the past I had downloaded the necessary patches and saved them in some backup, but I couldn't find the necessary files, so I had to search them again on the web. Fortunately, they are all still downloadable, and I thought that posting the links to the pages from which the patches can be downloaded might be useful for other colleagues:

Link for Zanichelli dictionaries (Ragazzini, Boch, Zingarelli, Morandini, McGraw Hill Zanichelli, Economics and Business, DELI)

Link for Hoepli dictionaries (Grande Dizionario di Inglese Picchi, Grande Dizionario di Spagnolo di L. Tam, Grande Dizionario Tecnico Francese, Grande Dizionario Tecnico Tedesco, Dizionario Tecnico Inglese Marolli)

Link for Sansoni/Rizzoli dictionaries (Dizionario Tedesco Sansoni, Dizionario Inglese Sansoni - also known as Grande Dizionario Rizzoli-Larousse)

I have personally tested the patches for the Picchi, Tam, Sansoni inglese and McGraw Hill Zanichelli, and they all work - I imagine that the patches for the other dictionaries also should work.