Online translation tools and multilingual dictionaries are valuable assets to perform tasks requiring regular or occasional foreign language skills. When it comes to writing/reading/editing reports, emails, translation/formalization of administrative documents or contracts: these tools can be useful.

However Professional translator tools are sometimes too expensive or is not deemed as essential, by many of us. Here is a selection of free e-language tools, that may help you in your tasks:

Online Multilingual dictionaries

Wordreferenceom

This site offers several multilingual dictionaries and a monolingual one in English. You can perform translation from French language to

English (and vice versa), it includes more than 100,000 references and 250,000 translations, making it one of the most comprehensive and reliable online dictionaries. It also supports other languages such as: German, Russian, Italian, Spanish.....

It meets all the needs of linguists and professionals who need to translate technical terms: it provides for example translations of words belonging to lexical highly specialized fields (science, marketing, Legal etc.).

Just like a standard dictionary, translations of words include all the possible meanings, with examples of use.

The phonetic spelling of words, morphology (plural-singular, genus), parts of speech (noun, adjective), ....

The dictionary offers a monolingual listening feature (English)

It provides a forum for discussions.

en.bab.la

This [https://en.bab.la/ portal comprises a total of 25 dictionaries, in 15 languages. It serves both multilingual dictionary and language learning resources (cultural and grammar quizzes, vocabulary lessons, play activity). It also includes a discussion forum, just like WordRefenceom.

en.bab.la meet the needs of technical translation.

Visualization of translated entries is very fast, with the various possible meanings of words and their synonyms.

It works like a wiki, users can participate by offering their own translations, editing those already present, and providing examples.

It offers a human translation service.

Lingueeom

Lingueeom can translate word combinations and idioms (French to English) by contextualizing the translation of the word or phrase.

The originality of this tool is that it relies on a database of texts translated by professionals with connections from one language to another.

The user can compare different instances given and select those that best suit their needs translation.

Linguee has bee designed for the purposes of vocational and technical translation

Online Translation of multilingual texts

Translators portals and search engines

Online translators from Google (which can also translate web pages) and Bing supports over 30 languages.

The Babel Fish translation tool from Yahoo notably allows to translate from French (and vice versa) to English, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese.

Tradukkaom

This online translation service supports some 52 languages and allows translation of texts within a limit of 5000 characters: besides its high reliability for a free tool, its main feature of this tool is the automatic detection of languages

It generates translations in real time.

Promom

This tool, which can translate French into English, German, Spanish and Russian (or vice versa). It also provides a filter by thematic area, which is supposed help refine the quality of the translation (eg, communication, business, computing, medicine, etc..). It also includes a spell checking tool.