The Effectiveness of Electronic Dictionaries as a Tool for Translators
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (1997)Abstract
In view of the growing popularity of electronic dictionaries, the Consumer Council of Hong Kong, a statutory body financed by annual subvention from the Government of Hong Kong to protect and promote the interests of the consumers of goods and services, conducted a survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the various functions of 15 models of electronic dictionaries available in 1994. The authors, who served as consultants in all language-related aspects of this survey, will evaluate the usefulness of these dictionaries to translators on the basis of the survey findings. Their vocabulary database in the realms of difficult, modern, and scientific and technical words as well as phrases will be explored in that lists of words and phrases are meticulously compiled before the words and phrases are checked in the dictionaries. Moreover, as two electronic dictionaries claim that they could translate English sentences into Chinese, different types of sentences are tested to see whether or not they are able to produce satisfactory translations.