ONLINE DICTIONARIES
Updated September 2011
is the dictionary I use most and I believe it is the best. It offers translation to and from French (plus Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Portuguese). When you search a word or phrase it comes up with a good list of options. It also has a members' forum which you can consult for harder translations. Its creator, Michael Kellogg, says: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world for free on the Internet. The site has grown gradually ever since to become one of the most-used online dictionaries...".
Linguee . "...a unique translation tool combining an editorial dictionary and a search engine with which you can search through hundreds of millions of bilingual texts for words and expressions." Recently greatly enhanced, it works well. Could be a serious competitor for Wordreference. Try typing in whole phrases or idiomatic expressions. NEW 22.9.11
BabLa does much of what Wordreference does, but with added sound. Its forum did not seem so well established when I last looked, but it produces lots of references. It seems a little less user-friendly than Wordreference in that it is less easy to jump from Eng-Fre to Fre-Eng.
Lexilogos is an excellent place to start as it is a portal to a range of dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual (including Collins, Cambridge, Ultralingua and Wordreference).
Ultralingua is a company which sells language software, but which also has a free online dictionary. It offers plenty of examples when you do a French-English search.
Mediadico offers an additional feature for French users in that it will speak words out loud in English. You can also download a toolbar feature if you want the dictionary to hand all the time. This is also the source for the dictionary used on the TV5 site.
Google works fine and is very clear, though it seems to offer fewer translations than some others. If you have a web page you can easily download some script which enables readers to translate your content. It can also be added as a button to your web browser for ease of use.
Sensagent (Alexandria) is another dictionary which you can download and use in Word and Windows as a button on your toolbar.
The Dictionnaire International is a very clear and quick monolingual dictionary. If you type in a verb it also gives you complete conjugations.
Reverso has the advantage of linking to specialist dictionaries for computer, medical and business use. I tried the medical one and it was able to translate some quite obscure terms! The computer terms I put in were easily handled from English to French.
L'Internaute is a very good monolingual dictionary which also has alphabetical lists of words by theme, for example history, law and politics.
The CNRTL (Centre National des Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales) is a highly detailed dictionary with lots of examples of word use from literature and history. Very instructive if not easy on the eye. The search system only seems to handle entries of individual words which is a disadvantage. However, you can customise the dictionary and search via word classes. There are also sections for etymology, synonyms and antonyms. The latter two show bar charts to indicate the degree of sameness and differentness. The homepage says: "Créé en 2005 par le CNRS, le CNRTL fédère au sein d’un portail unique, un ensemble de ressources linguistiques informatisées et d’outils de traitement de la langue.
Le CNRTL intègre le recensement, la documentation (métadonnées), la normalisation, l’archivage, l’enrichissement et la diffusion des ressources.
La pérennité du service et des données est garantie par l’adossement à l’UMR ATILF (CNRS – Nancy Université), le soutien du CNRS ainsi que l’intégration dans le projet d’infrastructure européenne CLARIN.
The TLFI is a detailed monolingual dictionary.
Le Dictionnaire is a monolingual dictionary which is clear and attractive, though not particularly detailed. It prefers you to search with single words which can be frustrating if you have a phrase to translate.