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Online research: what are you loving and hating?
Thread poster: Elizabeth Adams
Elizabeth Adams
Elizabeth Adams  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 10:44
Member (2002)
Russian to English
TOPIC STARTER
Source terms in quotes Mar 12, 2019

You won't get any mocking from me. I have a red spot on my forehead from beating my head on the computer screen. How are you working around the issue? When I search for ["transmission gear key"] the results are not splitting the words up.

Kay-Viktor Stegemann wrote:

Elizabeth, you (and the search engines) might be right for searches by the general public, but when I use search engines as a translator, I often have a certain phrase or term that I need to research, and this term is a given, because it appears in the source I have to translate. My search term is not something I came up with, it is something my client came up with, so a discussion whether this search term might be useful or not is totally beside the point - it is exactly this term that I need to translate right now and therefore I have to dig it up in the Internet or a dictionary if possible at all. Just an hour ago I had such a case: I had to translate the term "gear key" (in an automotive context), and this is a typical problem. This thing is a certain part of an automotive transmission, and the single terms "gear" and "key" are extremely generic, multi-purpose words; a search for these words in any other order or spelling than the precise string "gear key" will render enormous amounts of totally irrelevant results. So yes, this is very much of a problem, and the search engine telling me that I'm not using the right words feels just like mocking to me.


Luca Gentili
 
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Germany
Local time: 18:44
English to German
In memoriam
  Mar 12, 2019

Elizabeth Adams wrote:

You won't get any mocking from me. I have a red spot on my forehead from beating my head on the computer screen. How are you working around the issue? When I search for ["transmission gear key"] the results are not splitting the words up.


In this case I found the solution in the TM (in Memsource) where "gear key" did not appear, but "gear keyway" was already translated, and I could deduct that the "gear key" goes into the "gear keyway" and thereby find the correct target term. In fact, using the quotes often does not help me either, but it would help me enormously if the search engines (in this case, the Memsource concordance search) would treat hits that contain both exact search terms as most relevant.

By the way, Wikipedia is also an important source for research, and the Wikipedia search engine often gives me similar headaches.


 
Luca Gentili
Luca Gentili  Identity Verified
Belgium
Local time: 18:44
English to Italian
+ ...
Context is the key Mar 13, 2019

As Elizabeth pointed out, the key to narrow the search result set when you look for a phrase consisting of extremely common words (which the artificial "intelligece" of the search engine will inevitably try to split and rearrange) is giving some ore "context".

If you think about it it is exactly what we all do in the KudoZ section when a poster asks for translation without giving us any clue about the context. I usually quote the phrase I am looking for and force the presence of ot
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As Elizabeth pointed out, the key to narrow the search result set when you look for a phrase consisting of extremely common words (which the artificial "intelligece" of the search engine will inevitably try to split and rearrange) is giving some ore "context".

If you think about it it is exactly what we all do in the KudoZ section when a poster asks for translation without giving us any clue about the context. I usually quote the phrase I am looking for and force the presence of other "keywords" (e.g. +transmission "gear key") in order to get less but more relevant results.



Kay-Viktor Stegemann wrote:

In this case I found the solution in the TM (in Memsource) where "gear key" did not appear, but "gear keyway" was already translated, and I could deduct that the "gear key" goes into the "gear keyway" and thereby find the correct target term. In fact, using the quotes often does not help me either, but it would help me enormously if the search engines (in this case, the Memsource concordance search) would treat hits that contain both exact search terms as most relevant.

By the way, Wikipedia is also an important source for research, and the Wikipedia search engine often gives me similar headaches.
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Elizabeth Adams
MollyRose
 
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 18:44
French to English
verbatim Mar 13, 2019

Matthias Brombach wrote:

Kay Denney wrote:


except that Chris specified "in quotes".


I see, my post is not self-explaining:

It works only with the shown settings AND with the searched phrase in quotes (as in the figure above in my first post).

[Bearbeitet am 2019-03-12 16:10 GMT]

yes I see you use the Verbatim setting. I just tried that for "oyster ports" and "oyster farming ports". Linguee suggested both and I wanted to see which was the most common expression. I got exactly the same list of websites on the first page, including some that only had "oyster ports" when I was searching "oyster farming ports". Moreover when I had Verbatim ticked, Google didn't specify the number of hits which I always like to check. (I'm now checking out "oyster farms" which seems more likely in English.)


Elizabeth Adams
MollyRose
 
Matthias Brombach
Matthias Brombach  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 18:44
Member (2007)
Dutch to German
+ ...
Yes, that´s sad ... Mar 13, 2019

Kay Denney wrote: Moreover when I had Verbatim ticked, Google didn't specify the number of hits which I always like to check.


I would like to check that too, and I´m afraid there is no way so far. And not to forget to exclude phrases / terms occuring by one and the same website in that mode (could be a translation and we all know, how trustworthy translations are ...).


 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 18:44
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Alta Vista found what I wanted. Google fails! Mar 13, 2019

In the days of Alta Vista

Elizabeth Adams wrote:

But the internet as a whole was so much less useful back then!!



I am not sure I agree. Using Boolean logic and other search strategies - like setting my language to Danish and searching for an English string - that way I could find English websites of Danish public authorities, for instance, or other strings that were not always easy to guess at. There may be far more out there, but I get the impression I find less and less.
Instead, I subscribe to all sorts of online dictionaries and resources, and find abbreviations etc. in hard-copy, which I used to find on the Internet with AltaVista. At least, that is my impression.
Or I ask around in my network of colleagues, who are absolutely wonderful.

The general public might not want to look up things in different languages or use Boolean logic, but disabling these otherwise very useful functions is a totally retrograde step.

My husband and I are multilingual, but live in Denmark. Google simply makes a mess of some websites when it tries to offer them to us in Danish! We often want Italian in Italian, because we are trying to learn the correct way of saying things, and honestly, real English is easier to understand than machine-translated attempts at Danish!

By the time I have worked out how to outsmart the search engine, I have often forgotten what I was trying to find. I have to go back to my source text several times to check.
OK, I am past retiring age, but I don't seem to be suffering from dementia in other ways, so I blame Google.
It is TOO smart, and too difficult to override when I know how to search, but Google has other ideas.


 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
Doesn't work for me Mar 14, 2019

Matthias Brombach wrote:
Should be self-explaining and I hope, it helps.

Thanks but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
If I search on "around the term premium" in quotes and select verbatim, at the top of the screen it says 30,000 hits but when you scroll down you discover there are actually only two pages of hits.
I frequently search on two or more similar phrases to gauge the most common usage like this, and this bug makes the process much slower.


 
Tímea Torzsás
Tímea Torzsás  Identity Verified
Local time: 18:44
French to Hungarian
+ ...
for Eur-Lex related search: Juremy.com Oct 27, 2020

What I dislike the most is when translating an EU-related text, I have to open a series of documents on Eur-Lex at random, trying to find the matching expression in a bilingual view. To set search criteria, source of law, language pair, etc. up, I have to click through several windows. This way, research of one single expression can take several minutes.

I use Juremy.com instead for Eur-Lex terminology search, it is much faster, and it provides reference metadata as well.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 17:44
Member (2008)
Italian to English
what? Oct 27, 2020

Elizabeth Adams wrote:

I would love to hear about what is working or not working for you in your day-to-day practice


I have no idea what that means.


 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
Really? Oct 27, 2020

Tom in London wrote:

Elizabeth Adams wrote:

I would love to hear about what is working or not working for you in your day-to-day practice


I have no idea what that means.

How on Earth do you cope as a translator when faced with an imperfect source text?!


Kay Denney
Michele Fauble
Svetlana Djuricin
 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 17:44
Member (2008)
Italian to English
That Oct 27, 2020

Chris S wrote:

Tom in London wrote:

Elizabeth Adams wrote:

I would love to hear about what is working or not working for you in your day-to-day practice


I have no idea what that means.

How on Earth do you cope as a translator when faced with an imperfect source text?!


That wasn't the question. I could answer that question. I would know what it was about.

[Edited at 2020-10-27 14:36 GMT]


 
expressisverbis
expressisverbis
Portugal
Local time: 17:44
Member (2015)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
What I hate/love in an online research Oct 27, 2020

I hate to see what I have just seen now - a job posting: "0.01USD - 0.02USD per word translation"...
One of my favourite search engines in terms of bilingual concordancers/terminology research is Webisearch.
It is an excellent resource!


 
Luca Tutino
Luca Tutino  Identity Verified
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
That's easy! Oct 28, 2020

Kay Denney wrote:
...
yes I see you use the Verbatim setting. I just tried that for "oyster ports" and "oyster farming ports". Linguee suggested both and I wanted to see which was the most common expression. I got exactly the same list of websites on the first page, including some that only had "oyster ports" when I was searching "oyster farming ports". Moreover when I had Verbatim ticked, Google didn't specify the number of hits which I always like to check. (I'm now checking out "oyster farms" which seems more likely in English.)


With Verbatim on: "oyster ports" -"oyster farming ports"
To see the number of hits just click the "Tools" button again (7250 hits on my search above, none showing "oyster farming ports").
What leaves me a bit perplexed here sometimes, it's when the Verbatim search brings more results than the regular one.


 
Luca Tutino
Luca Tutino  Identity Verified
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
MT or poor quality translations in unexpected places Oct 28, 2020

A more serious problem, for me, is the fact that more and more often google searches bring up more wrong translations than helpful ones. This used to be limited to special technical terms which also happen to appear on certain websites. I have been trying to work around this by inserting (via a macro key) the following string at the end of all such sarches:

-directindustry -alibaba -"made-in-china" -pinterest -aliexpress -ebay -"traduzione automatica"

It used to work q
... See more
A more serious problem, for me, is the fact that more and more often google searches bring up more wrong translations than helpful ones. This used to be limited to special technical terms which also happen to appear on certain websites. I have been trying to work around this by inserting (via a macro key) the following string at the end of all such sarches:

-directindustry -alibaba -"made-in-china" -pinterest -aliexpress -ebay -"traduzione automatica"

It used to work quite well until a couple of years ago but lately the problem is worsening, I find. Often I also find that a translation that is right in a certain context is applied in the wrong context. More and more, I now find poor and even MT translations of such terms in places where I would expect good quality references. This is particularly misleading because it appears even when I introduce context in my searches, and requires great care to avoid reproducing the error in my work.

I am afraid that many colleagues do not pay attention to this aspect, and this is polluting google corpus of multilanguage documents. Establishing the authority of the different sources is becoming more difficult and time-consuming than it used to be.
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Elizabeth Adams
Christel Zipfel
MollyRose
 
Luca Tutino
Luca Tutino  Identity Verified
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
Hate: True hits to documents which are impossible to browse and search Oct 28, 2020

A less serious problem, still quite annoying, is the increasing number of websites which are collecting documents and return a hit for my carefully crafted search terms, only to show an abstract or an image of the document: they usually require me giving away some money or an email address to enable searching into it, only to offer a crappy and unsuitable online-only browsing application.

Also annoying when I am allowed to download the document for further reading and study, and the
... See more
A less serious problem, still quite annoying, is the increasing number of websites which are collecting documents and return a hit for my carefully crafted search terms, only to show an abstract or an image of the document: they usually require me giving away some money or an email address to enable searching into it, only to offer a crappy and unsuitable online-only browsing application.

Also annoying when I am allowed to download the document for further reading and study, and then I discover that - even if Google could clearly read and index the text - the download is an unsearchable pdf. Some of these image-only PDFs are even OCR resistant. Others use sophisticated text coding techniques that I never managed to work with. I understand and support I.P. protection. But it is really annoying that such documents, often of very scarce independent value, are also not offered separately for sale or available for consultation anywhere on the web or elsewhere.

I also hate expensive multilanguage standards, where I know that an "official translation" exists, but I am not allowed to get it unless I pay a multiple of my current job total price.

Finally, I used to hate SAP secrecy about their glossaries. But now that they are relatively more open, I think I realize that they used to hide them more because they are shy about the crazy logic of their terminology translations
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Christopher Schröder
 
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