The GITS Blog

Good dictionaries are an indispensable tool for the translator. They can be expensive, but it's money well spent.

Actually though, I believe that you shouldn't be doing too much dictionary work in your translations, because it means that you don't know your field very well, and are likely to put out a lousy translation. IMHO, of course.

For a lot of translators, Google has partially — but not completely — replaced dictionaries. Dictionaries are still a vital tool, however. There are also a couple of free online glossaries — 英次郎 and Glova are two I occasionally use — but their lack of professional editing shows pretty clearly. They do have lots of entries, however, so at least they can give you ideas.

Like most professional translators, I own a metric ton of dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual. Probably also like most professional translators, I rarely use any of them, and some of them I haven't even opened in years. Below are some of the bilingual dictionaries I find the most useful in my work.

研究者　新和英大辞典 (AKA The Green Goddess)

The Green Goddess is the queen of J-E dictionaries. The fifth edition has almost half a million entries. Prior editions of the GG were a favorite source of amusement for their many translations ranging from quaint to bizarre, but the fifth edition is really quite good. Native English speakers were used extensively to translate and proofread entries, and it shows. A few howlers still remain, but it is really the best general J-E dictionary available today. It's also one of the most useful for translators, since the huge number of examples allows it to serve as a kind of translator's thesaurus.

I own the fourth edition, and subscribe to the fifth edition electronically (which was 29 years in the making!). A great thing about the electronic edition is that it's constantly updated. That means it carries translations for a lot of neologisms, which as a translator I've got to deal with a lot.

電気情報和英辞典 (Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science Japanese-English Dictionary)

This is a great dictionary. It's really more a glossary than a dictionary, since it's just a glorified terminology list, but it has a lot of useful terminology in the IT/telecom fields, and the translations are usually very good.

It's also a bit out of date, having been published in 1991, but it still has a lot of great terms.　Here are some terms found through semi-random flipping:

数学英和・和英辞典

This little dictionary has got me out of more translation scrapes than I'd care to mention. When I've got some pesky mathematics term that I can't find in any other dictionary, and maybe can't even find any references on Google, I'll often find it in here. Despite the funky romaji headwords, these guys really know their math!

One thing you shouldn't expect from this dictionary is mathematical explanations. It's a terminology listing, plain and simple. If you don't know what the math term means, look it up in a monolingual mathematics text. It's also quite old, having been published in 1979. But new mathematics terminology doesn't pop up like IT terminology, and the dictionary is still very relevant today.

Japanese-English Dictionary of Computer (AKA The Lacker)

I don't care for this dictionary much, and not just because of the stupid name. The translations it gives are pretty good — it just seems like the words I look up are never in there. Either the lexicographers did some serious padding, or I've been really unlucky.

I'm including this dictionary mainly for the sake of completeness, but if you're not up to speed on computer terminology, it might be useful to have.