Use WWW resources for translation classes in Taiwan

Abstract

In the past, dictionaries, encyclopedia and other reference books were indispensable tools for people doing translation. And it has been very common for students in translation classes to be handed a long list of text books, all sorts of dictionaries, encyclopedia and other reference books. It is almost impossible for the students to spend a lot of money to buy them all. Besides, the heavy weight of those reference books, the shortage of space for them and the huge amount of time that the students have used to look up for new words in dictionaries or in other reference books have also been big problems for the students. And every now and then they might not be able to find the words in any dictionaries on the market. Problems like these make our students grumble when they do translation. Consequently, translation becomes less interesting.To make translation class full of fun and to make translation more feasible, we think that teachers should introduce the World Wide Web resources for translation to their students. In this paper, we will first introduce different kinds of translation resources on the Web which are very useful for teachers as well as students in Taiwan. We will compile a list of' these resources based on different subjects, such as on-line multi-lingual dictionaries, encyclopedia, jargons of legal, computer, medical, and business terms, rhetorics, corpora, machine translation, translation schools, conferences, workshops, references, and on-line translation services. We will evaluate some of them briefly.