Links

Here’s a short list of websites we find informative, useful, helpful and amusing. Last updated on 16 Sep 2009.

Dictionaries and glossaries

Eurodicautom The fruits of our colleagues’ labours in Luxembourg. Sadly, the database hasn’t been updated since its migration to the IATE database, which is open to all EU institutions but not the public.

Terminology portal The University of Applied Sciences in Cologne has put together an interesting selection of databases on an attractive website. A must-see!!!

Online dictionaries (1) Extensive collection.

Online dictionaries (2) Compiled by the Baden-Württemberg Library Service.

Telecommunications and data security  Weka Media provides some useful information on the subject.

English acronyms and abbreviations – Extensive collection – worth a visit.

Fish and marine mammals Extensive glossary in English, German, French, Latin, Icelandic …

Blaupunkt terminology (in German only) Glossary of German terms (extensive!)

Varta battery glossary Glossaries in German, English, French and Spanish.

Computer ABC Glossary with terms from the world of computing and the Net.

Marketing Information from the wonderful world of suppliers and market researchers. This “encyclopaedic dictionary” is a useful aid to translation from English to German and vice versa.

Eurostat Sounds like statistics but this is, in fact, a very extensive database of concepts and expressions for describing measurable life in the EU. You will find not only statistical terms here, but also concepts and expressions from all walks of life, from “A job of limited duration” to “Zero-coupon bonds”. Sadly this database is also no longer being updated and, although the new RAMON portal is open to the public, it is far more complicated to use. Invest a little patience and time to try things out and you can unearth some interesting multilingual terminology databases to download onto your computer for future reference. If you need any help, talk to Textra.

Statistics And to keep the statistics fans happy, too, here is an extensive glossary from ISI in a number of languages. It will even tell you the Farsi for "Bayesian rule".

E-technology The IEC has compiled more than 20,000 terms in English, German, French and Spanish in the online database on its website. The full glossary is available on CD-ROM for a little less than € 300.

Food additives Knowing the Greek or Hungarian for “glutamate” can be important, especially for allergy sufferers. The European Consumer Centre provides this information in its so-called “E-list”, which contains the names of around 300 approved food additives in all EU languages.

Information

EU laws As hardly anyone knows from memory what all the EU laws, ordinances and regulations are called in the various official state languages, it’s far better to go straight to the “horse’s mouth”, the legislative body, and look them up…

German laws The Federal Ministry of Justice provides access to almost the entire body of German law – with a full-text search engine!

Medicine Includes a thesaurus of medical terms

Press Enter keywords to put together a press review

Science+Technology Easy-to-understand and entertaining information on scientific subjects (English)

Patents Publication and information services of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA)

The Internet Movie Database A host of cinematographic information (English).

Quotes, clips, classics

Quotations (1) Who was that from again? Bartleby.com helps you find out fast. By the way, Bartleby the Scrivenor is a very readable story by Herman Melville.

Quotations (2) If you don’t strike it lucky with Bartleby, try again here.

Bible Study Tools on GOSHEN A veritable fount of English bible quotations

Book Translator The website of the European College of Translators in Straelen is a must-visit for anyone already translating novels or specialised books or thinking about starting and who’s looking for useful translation aids and dialogue with colleagues.

Travel

Holiday Spanish Lots of Germans feel of the pull of the south at holiday time. Spain heads the list of favoured destinations and it’s nice to brush up your Spanish before you go. A good way for German speakers to do that is with 'Spanisch in 14 Tagen' on spanisch-live.de, where you can accompany Paul and Marie on their travels around Mallorca (!) and learn important words and phrases along the way…

DB – German rail – enquiries and timetable

Buses and trains in Hamburg (HVV)

Buses and trains in Berlin (BVG)

NDR traffic news: Drivers can read up here on the traffic news that goes out on NDR, North German Radio. Updates roughly every five minutes.

How far is it from A to B?

 

Features

Perlentaucher  Daily compilation from the feature pages of the best German-language newspapers. Also, every Monday, what’s new from the international magazines on culture and current affairs. magazines. There’s also a weekly book review … Available in English, too!

Heartbreak online The online poetry generator AM-2020 helps with lovelorn lyrics of up to 25 lines and even has digital settings for despair level and boredom factor. You don’t have to be a lovesick teenager, but you do need English for this!

Lyrical stuff To receive a free poetry e-mail every day, poetry fans just have to subscribe. More than 1000 poems have already gone out since April 2001. If you missed them, don’t worry. You can read them on the website or buy the book.

Poetry Making sure prose doesn’t miss out here, here’s a site with both. German scholar Kay Gaumann invites you to typenrad.de to read fragmentary thoughts, poems, manifestos and short stories. If you have any material of your own you would like to contribute for publishing, write to info@typenrad.de ...

Website shredder Landed on one of those nasty, garish, flashing homepages full of banners and tasteless typography again? With a little time to spare and a desire to vent your irritation, you can do more than just flee the site. This shredder chews up the very worst a homepage creator’s sick mind can produce and spits it out as an appealing, psychedelic artwork – but sadly not on the Web, only on your own computer.