DiCE: Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español

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


DiCE: Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español

Terminology search and confirmation with Google

Last week, my partner had to find a good translation into Spanish for "wireless hot spot". A first search in the Microsoft language portal suggested "zona interactiva inalámbrica" (2 hits), while a search in the KudoZ glossaries gave "zona local de cobertura" (1 hit only), although, of course, we found plenty of results for "hot spot" and for "wireless" not combined in the same string.

We turned to Google, searching for "hot spot" and "inalámbrico". Among the 9,640 hits we found "hot spot inalámbrico" and "punto de acceso inalámbrico hot spot" (besides many pages with "inalámbrico" and "hot spot", but not in the same string). This suggested "punto de acceso" as part of the solution.

Now we searched for the exact string "hot spot inalámbrico", limiting the search to pages written in Spanish. This gave us 501 hits. "Hot spot inalámbrico" was a possible candidate, then, although not the best: it sounded too colloquial and it had far too few hits for such a widespread technology.

We tried again, still restricting the search to pages written in Spanish. This time we searched for the exact string "punto de acceso inalámbrico". Result: 155,000 hits, an excellent candidate translation.

For confirmation, we tried the translations suggested by Microsoft and by KudoZ, searching only pages in Spanish. "Zona interactiva inalámbrica" yielded 10 results in Google; "zona local de cobertura" only two hits, and both of them about cell phones, rather than wireless Internet hot spots.

So we finally chose "punto de acceso inalámbrico".

This search strategy gives excellent results and can easily be adapted to other languages and fields. An experienced translator, however, should develop a feeling for the number of hits given by a candidate term. Too few hits mean that you are on the wrong track (especially if there is a large difference between the number of hits for the source string and for the candidate term). But "too few hits" is relative: 500 hits could have been a good candidate term for some less widespread technology.

"In the translation business, one size does not fit all"

In an article published today on HeraldToday.com, Dana Sanchez writes how "...some tourist organizations are translating their published materials into other languages."

It goes on to say that not only other languages should be considered, but also dialects, mentioning, among other things, how the material was made available in several different varieties of Spanish, because "Any business that wants to communicate effectively with the Spanish-speaking audience needs to take dialect into account[...]: 'One size does not fit all'".

Currently there seems to be a real fixation, especially in the US, about translating into regional varieties of Spanish (a customer of ours even asked about "Virginia Spanish", under the impression that the Hispanic population resident in Virginia spoke a distinct variety of the language, presumably different from North Carolina Spanish, Maryland Spanish, or whatever).

However, several excellent Spanish-speaking linguists, from different countries, have pointed out that such differences are mostly in the mind of customers that do not speak Spanish themselves, and that any educated person from a Spanish-speaking country would have no difficulty communicating with people from other Spanish-speaking countries.

An excellent presentation about this was given by Guillermo Cabanellas at last year's ATA Conference in Seattle.