Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 June 21

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June 21

Translation from German needed

Hello everybody! Since I am admittedly a bit stuck here with my recent investigation, I would like to give it a try and ask you for a nice translation of the sentence "lass dich von seinem Gerede auf keinen Fall zu irgendeinem Unsinn hinreißen!". I marked the parts that matter to me most. Hoping for your kind support,--Erdic (talk) 09:23, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

PS: Please feel free to also correct my enquiry as such if you find any mistakes. Thanks a lot in advance!--Erdic (talk) 09:25, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Not a native speaker, so someone may correct me, but a translation would be something like "Don't under any circumstances let his gossip draw you into doing something stupid". --Xuxl (talk) 12:56, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Native speaker: The above suggestion is perfectly valid. My version would be: 'Don´t let yourself (or: don´t allow yourself to) be tricked into some nonsense by his verbiage. Depending on the context there may be better alternatives. Clearly, this is direct speech in a fairly colloquial mode where vocabulary & semantics are both subjective and fuzzy. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 14:38, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

@Xuxl and Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM: Many thanks for your answers! In the meantime, I found these suggestions. Would you say all of them are idiomatic, too?--Erdic (talk) 01:26, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

German–American-English online dictionary?

Hello, I have a somewhat fundamental question: Is there any German–American-English [online] dictionary on the market? What do professional American translators use? I'm asking here because up to now, I couldn't manage to find anything of that kind yet. Best--Erdic (talk) 22:56, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

American translators use specialist dictionaries almost exclusively. Which ones depends on your specialty; medical, aerospace, chemical, legal, financial, business, petroleum exploitation, mechanical engineering, and so on. I have always used print dictionaries, and occasionally research some difficult words online. I don't know of any good online technical dictionaries. The only ones I find online are small technical vocabularies. —Stephen (talk) 07:02, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

You could try an online forum, for example this one: [1]. 94.195.147.35 (talk) 08:30, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Try the Collins German Dictionary online. It has both US and UK English definitions indicated. (e.g. "tap" EN>DE). I use the Collins German Concise Dictionary dico, 3rd Edition (treeware), for independent study as it provides much idiomatic context. There are a number of online DE dicos. Our Austrian interns like dict.cc which is crowdsourced. I prefer leo online, especially for its usage forum. As for the AE vs BE aspect - if you aren't entirely fluent in one or the other version of English, just check the suggested translation in your preferred English-language dictionary. I (= professional Hebrew>English translator) use Merriam-Webster's online for my native US English. For British I used to use a CD version of MS Encarta's dico that came bundled with the treeware World English Dictionary, otherwise I don't know what online options are available. Hope this helps. -- 15:32, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

@Stephen G. Brown: Very interesting, thanks a lot for this insight! I really wouldn't have thought that, but that may indeed explain the lack I revealed here. Best--Erdic (talk) 01:03, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

@Deborahjay: Thank you very much for your kind response! Of course, I already knew all of the dictionaries you mentioned since I've been in search of the issue in question for quite some time now. What I for my part can highly recommend besides Collins, which I also use frequently, is PONS online, since they have a very professional editorial staff with native speakers and they do quite a good job with a very comprehensive and differentiated dictionary that considers also very specific varieties (f. i. Australian or South African English) apart from BE and AE. However, it is still a German and not an American product... And then there's also Langenscheidt, the most and longest-established German dictionary for English, also with professional editors, but their translations are occasionally somewhat stiff or unidiomatic if you ask me. Yet this is also a very extensive dictionary – in many cases even more detailed than PONS. dict.cc and leo.org are of course not professional projects, which mainly consist of mostly undifferentiated word lists, and thus, I admittedly have quite some reservations about them. But thank you anyway for your friendly advice! Best wishes--Erdic (talk) 01:03, 24 June 2017 (UTC)