Suggestions on How to Become Established as a Freelance Translator

Buying Dictionaries

You will need a basic stock of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries – you can never have too many dictionaries and you will never have enough. However, it is hardly cost effective to buy a specialist dictionary for every subject you may or may not be asked to translate during your career – and it is simply impossible. So choose wisely and selectively.

Before you spend vast amounts of money on specialist dictionaries, ask experienced translators who specialise in the same field as you do for recommendations. But don’t just ask one, ask two or three. Opinions vary. But there are excellent dictionaries out there and there are those that will gather dust on your shelves and are simply useless. I would now not buy a single dictionary unless I have seen it myself or it has been recommended to me.

Another way of testing dictionaries is trying them out. Take a couple of texts for translation to a library that stocks good dictionaries or to a specialist book shop and search for the words you don’t know. Are they actually in the dictionary? Are the translations given relevant? Do they “look right” to you? Are the terms used up to date? One way to check, is to type the terms you found into a search engine and see what hits you get. If no one uses the term, it is either extremely specialised or just not used – or it is misspelled.

Nowadays, you often have the choice between a CD and a hard copy. I think that is very much a personal preference. I, personally, prefer hard copies, if only to get away from the monitor for a few moments. If you are a wizard on the keyboard and familiar with your software, you may find the word you are looking for much faster on the CD.

There are innumerable dictionary and glossary links on the Internet (see my link section for a very short introduction). Two good ways to find dictionaries online:
– Type a word in both source and target language into the search window (e.g. selbstständig self-employed). This may find you bilingual source texts or dictionaries that hold the terminology you need.
– In the language you are looking for, type into the search box the appropriate subject matter, e.g. "tennis", "18th century poetry" or a couple of the terms you are looking for and add "dictionary" or "glossary". If you are very lucky, you may find exactly what you need.

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