Sunday, January 20, 2013

Roundup of my favorite online foreign language resources


Update!

While preparing a presentation for my media Arabic class, I needed the term "middle income country" in Arabic. Crowd-sourcing came through as usual, and my lovely friend Alex sent me the link to a UN database of terms. I hereby enthusiastically add it to my list of favorite foreign language resources.

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"UNTERM is a multilingual terminology database which provides United Nations nomenclature, technical or specialized terms and common phrases in all six official UN languages - English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic."

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This website, maintained by PhD student Erol Baykal, is fantastic. You enter the root letters of the verb and the form and poof, a chart of conjugations appears. Amazing.



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Dr. Martin Beaudoin from the University of Alberta, Campus Saint-Jean maintains Le Devoir conjugal. This site likewise produces conjugations (for more than 7400 French verbs, including rare and Canadian verbs). Just gorgeous.



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IATE (Inter-Active Terminology for Europe) is the EU inter-institutional terminology database, and provides translations of words and phrases from and into EU languages. It allows you to narrow results by domains, including politics, law, science and many others.


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Leo offers translations into and from German into several other languages. It has been simplifying my life since 2001 at least.


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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Hans Wehr Part 2: Update!

Dear Fellow Arabophiles and Hans Wehr Devotees!

The wonderful Alaina, who has starred in many of my posts, informs me this very morning that web searching "Hans Wehr biography" yields my blog entry Hans Wehr Part 1 as the #1 result!! This is exciting news!

I have a wonderful Hans Wehr tidbit to share, and then I promise to add a follow up on my research attempts in Leipzig in 2010.

Here is the tidbit...


I found this gem by chance while searching for information about where Hans Wehr is buried. The source is: Zeitschriften der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1983). There is also an information rich write up on Hans Wehr in German, which I will translate and summarize for the Hans Wehr devotees who haven't had time to learn my favorite foreign language!

You're welcome!