Re: CHAT: German help
| From: | Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, July 1, 2006, 3:54 |
|---|
--- Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>
> Oh, no... I have the huge Langenscheidt's New
> College Grammar Dictionary. I can hardly lug it
> with one hand to my desk.
I was referring to the pocket dictionary, my first
German-English dictionary. Of course, you wouldn't
want to lug around a ten-kilo book, unless you're just
that masochistic.
> How reliable is Babelfish anyway? I tried, as some
> of you may have seen,
> translating an English sentence into German and back
> into English and got
> some curious results. Most of the German sentences
> looked "okay," but it
> really takes someone truly TRULY bilingual to do
> this kind of exercise. I
> have yet to try out any of the formal letters I've
> received from strict
> librarians.
Not very reliable, in my opinion. It's good to look up
words, but I prefer the LEO dictionary for that; the
lexicon is bigger, and comes with examples. I used
Babelfish to translate large quantities of vocabulary
items (I'd write up a list of English words I wanted
to know in German, and plugged it in), until I
discovered LEO.
Babelfish isn't absolutely useless, but there're
better utilities out there. And nothing beats asking a
native speaker (which you may not have access to,
depending on your location).
___________________________________________________________
Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de
Reply