The Hunter in Bilingual Jungles: How to Exploit the Web for Learning beyond Dictionaries

Unlike literary work imbued with culture and history, medical and other technical documents theoretically have to be translatable into all the languages of the world. However, this is easier said than done, largely because technologies never stop growing in both extent and complexity. With no hope of having an exhaustive glossary, technical translators in each field have to be adaptive to unfamiliar terminology. Here comes my proposal: try to learn new things simultaneously in two languages. Nowadays the Internet allows us to find a variety of documents that are loosely equivalent to each other but written in different languages. These document-pairs must be best suited for hunting down linguistic finds and to-the-point translation techniques. I try to make my presentation relevant to technical translation in general and plan to discuss a variety of examples extracted from easily accessible web resources, starting from Wikipedia articles and also covering patient medication guides and press releases.