EuroDicAutom
= must have
Online Tool
FREE

I used to translate articles about Web Site Usability from Italian to English. The problem was that I had only started to learn Italian two months before I took on this job and so I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. Maybe I would never have produced a sound translation without EuroDicAutom, because common dictionaries left me quite alone when it came to technical terms.

EuroDicAutom is an online dictionary provided by the European Commission. It offers a database with specialized and technical terms in 48 subject fields (e.g. Telecommunications, Agriculture, Computer Science) and covers 12 European languages. You can search for the translation of a term, an abbreviation or a phraseology. Search results contain the term in the source language, its translations in different subject fields, references and, if available, also synonyms, definitions, explanatory notes etc.

You are provided with some helpful search options, like searching for morphological variants of a word, when you click on a link called "My Profile". The dictionary could be much easier to use if all relevant options were directly available on the EuroDicAutom Home page and if they were labelled in a more meaningful way. A self-explaining interface would allow users to fully benefit from the tool even without having read the User Guide.

It should be possible to search for a term only in a selected subject field. If you want to translate "erosion" in a geographical text, you are not interested in learning what "erosion" means in medicine. Instead you want to obtain only results that are relevant for geography.