German language resources / Deutsche Grammatik im Internet

It’s been a while – two-and-a-half years – since I mentioned the useful site canoo.net – free online German language resources / Deutsche Grammatik, Online Wörterbuch zur Rechtschreibung, Flexion und Wortbild(ung?).

I have used it sometimes, but I don’t usually check my German grammar.

The site has now incorporated the latest spelling reform in its dictionaries and grammar pages. It says:

With 250,000 entries generating more than 3 million inflected word forms, Canoo.net is the most comprehensive spelling dictionary and German grammar resource available on the net.

There’s a good site search too.

4 thoughts on “German language resources / Deutsche Grammatik im Internet

  1. This article is a good advice, in fact. Firstly, a computer translator is a tool, and it needs some experience from those who use it. If the the wrong translations of some words were the only errors, Prof. Thionot has really bought a really good machine translator. Because this kind of erros can be corrected very easily by changing the translation of the words in question in the internal dictionary of the MT system, or just by selecting the proper domain-related dictionary.

    On the other hand, I’ve tested two different MT systems (available online), which, without any additional tuning, have translated from French into English “entreprise” as “firm” (translate.ru) or “company” (systransoft.com), and “frais” as expenses. Perhaps, in some other context these translation would be wrong as well, but it’s evident that the developpers are aware of the fact that economics is one of the popular thematic domains at present.

    As for the fact the no machine-translated text can be 100 percent reliable, it’s the simple truth, and every machine-translated text, before any publishing, must be verified by a human translator. In fact, in such a case, it’s more reasonable to hire a human translator who would use the MT system like an assistant. Otherwise, I wouldn’t spare 1000 dollars, or even 10,000, to buy such a wonder machine, a then sell its translations 10 cents per word! It would be really a pot of gold :) (Or would not buy it at all, since most of them can be used online for free.)

  2. Elena: yes, it’s quite likely Prof. Thionot had no idea how to adapt an MT program to his purposes and also no idea what was wrong with the English he got. It just seems to me you can’t really say definitively that undertaking, firm or company is wrong. I suspect the problem is that the word undertaking is not familiar in the USA and this is a US newspaper may have something to do with it.

  3. It’s a pity the first example started off on the wrong foot with the entreprise example. In fact, as you say Margaret, undertaking is the Euro-speak word of choice to cover a broad church of business organisations inc. partnerships, unincorporated associations and EU ‘economic interest groupings’.

    More importantly, my UK Chartered Accountant, who also teaches at a well-known Accountancy School back in London, suggested ‘associated undertakings’ when I asked him about entrprises liees/ linked enterprises and the Spanish equivalent.

    For info. Elena, about 15 years ago, EU organisations had 90% of texts human-translated and only 10% machine translated and then human-checked/vetted but not by an animal vet/ at that.

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