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Subsection Language Links indicates a list of various online tools for linguists, i.e. translators, copywriters, editors, etc. in particular and people who are involved and interested in language matters in general.

Prior to a some web-addresses interesting for all translators there are some links especially useful for
legal translators:

First, I'd like to refer to mailing lists for people involved in legal translation work, namely the
E Group Legal Translators and the
Yahoo Group Legal Translators. Lately, both merged together. And then, there is the discourse:
Language and Law by the Dutch lawyer Gerard-René de Groot,
Legal Translations: Some Tips by the American lawyer Francisco Avalos,
Legal Translation and Functionalist Approaches by the Italian lawyer Giuliana Garzone,
Legal Translation and Translation Theory by the Croatian translational scientist Susan Šarcevic. See further the
German-English Legal Translation Weblog by the British lawyer and legal translator Margaret Marks and the essay:
Pitfalls in Legal Translation by the Italian legal translator Davide De Leo and
Difficulties Encountered in the Translation of Legal Texts by the Turkish legal translator Ayfer Altay.

Now, let´s have a look on some common tools for translators, translating any conceivable subject:

To begin with, I´d like to say something about computer-based translation (corpus linguistics and computational linguistics).
Machine translation does not -and, as I firmly do believe, won´t displace 'conventional' human translation professionals, at least not in the foreseeable future.
However, if you´d like to examine current computer-based translators' capabilities you have some open-source products at your disposal. Check the remarkable
Linguaphile Translator or download the
Logos Open Source Machine Translation Instrument, developed by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, if it is about English - German - English. If it is about English - French - English, download the
Carabao Do-It-Yourself Machine Translation Kit.
Very well known and frequently used are the
Google Langauge Tools, the
Yahoo Langauge Tools,
Altavista Babelfish Translator and the
Lycos Translator, all of them are powered by
Systran Translation Technologies. Alternatively, see the trial opportunity of some other commercial translation software providers:
I Translator Online, the
World Lingo Translator, the
SDL Free Translation Service or the
PITS Online Translator.
Enter a short and easy structured sentence in the entry field of one of those tools, and you may be surprised at the result.
In addition, and even more interesting, these auto- translators may be used to ensure the use of correct syntax when writing in a non-native language.
Enter a sentence you doubt about in slightly different ways. Among the offered translations the appropriate one might be ascertained. You can´t believe this? Try it!

In order to check phrasing on usefulness, there´s yet another, easier and more accurate procedure. Go to the search engine
Alltheweb.com and enter the phrase in question within turned comma "...". The listing of search engine results then allows to discern whether such phrase has been used on any website, indexed by the search engine. Remarkably easy, yet highly effective! Beyond research with regard to terminology and phrasing, said feature may serve as most valuable tool for statistical linguistic research purposes since it offers an unmatched amount of text, written by the most conceivable number of copywriters. For example, if you would like to track levels of language awareness in general and writing rule awareness in particular among common people, you might do interesting findings! Once starting to utilize alltheweb.com or
Google.com (same procedure, enter the phrase that you want to track within turned comma) you will soon discover them as tools with hardly any limitation for the most different statistical language research requirements, and many other kinds of research! As an example for what I mean you can easily figure out what people commonly are interested in, looking for or buying, etc.

You also can use the phraseological search procedure for easily checking against duplication and thus for plagiarism. As of November 2004, in an attempt to unveil the so called Deep Web, Google offers
Google Scholar which might turn out to be an ideal mean for lecturers keen to convict students of cheating. (In order to prove who's the author and who's the plagiarist, approach the
Web Archive.)

Moreover, current search engines allow for close examination of various possible collocations. To give a random example of what I mean: enter Donkey and Goat into Google, and then Donkey and Whale. Since the latter query offers only a quarter of the number of entries compared to the former one, you may be fairly sure that there must be a closer linguistic (and thus logic) relation between donkeys and goats than between donkeys and whales (donkeys and goats are on land while whales move through the sea, even more so, donkeys and goats are domestic animals, whales aren't). Remarkably, the query Goat and Whale offers almost twice as many entries in comparison to the very first one (think of areas like Alaska, Southern-Argentina, New Zealand which are - somehow - spaces for goats and whales). And above that all, a simple search for Donkey and Goat and Whale yet reveals some collocation between donkeys, goats and whales. Hence, measured terminological relation through term co-occurrance investigation shows there must be any semantic connectivity among them (all of them are are exploited by man: for the production/extraction of salami, feta cheese and cod liver oil, besides that, think about (fairy) tails such as the City Musicians of Bremen, the Billy Goats Gruff, Moby Dick, and, although not easy doing so, all the animals are trained by man and ultimately, the very circumstance that all of them are mammals). As a matter of fact, only a simple but worked out random word game to prove the enormous potential of advanced quantity comparing in search engine results. A casual feature that might become exciting for developers of a semantic internet!
Now, what we have done here is using the so called Boolean operator *and* (default operator in Google, some other engines, however, have the *or* operator as default) for our analysis of possible collocations. There is, however, another Boolean operator much more suitable for our objective: *near* (adjacency and proximity operator, respectively) which is neither suggested by Google nor by Alltheweb (see Alltheweb Advanced Search and Google Advanced Search). Never mind, for this paticular goal there is a provision (script) called:
Google API Proximity Search (GAPS) which uses the Google API to search Google for "two search terms that appear within a certain distance from each other on a page".

B.t.w. I found internet search engines, thus automated information retrieval and classification items highly intriguing since I had my first experience with the World Wide Web in the early 90ies, see the subsite Website Architecture on eulenhaupt.com



What would a translator be without the help of dictionary sources?

When searching the World Wide Web for online dictionary sources in the late 90ies lots of promotional stuff had been dished up, though rather little useful contents, soemthing that has obviously changed in recent years. So currently there are really valuable monolingual English online dictionaries available, as you see them listed here in random order.
Try the
Simple Search of BNC-World ("The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written"), the
American Heritage Dictionary along with Roget's Thesaurus, available via Bartelby Online, basically, an immense database for Anglo-Saxon language, verse and literature. And then, there is the well-known
Merriam-Webster Dictionary as well as the
Wordsmyth Dictionary,
Collins Dictionary (via WordReference.com, the lowest entry-field at the right), the
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (click the button "online dictionary" at the right),
Heinle's Newbury House Dictionary of American English and the
Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words. Ditto, the
Grandiloquent Dictionary "an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language". Further to see, the innovative
Wiktionary, the free Dictionary, the renowned
Cambridge Advanced Learner's British English Dictionary, also available as Freesearch Dictionary) along with the
Cambridge Advanced Learner's American English Dictionary and the
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (I took some random samples and, in contrary to what one might expect -and unlike comparable provisions (Cambridge, Princeton), free Oxford online dictionaries must be considered comparatively curt). Finally, try the highly valuable
Princeton Word Net Dictionary offering a semantic, rather than orthographic approach. The dictionary, developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, is supposed to be an "online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets" In this context you might like to get familiar with the so called
Ontology Browser "An ontology is similar to a dictionary or glossary, but with greater detail and structure... An ontology consists of a set of concepts, relations, and axioms that formalize a field of interest" If you would prefer to browse the SUMO tool (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) with ordinary English words, just enter a term into the box labelled "English Term" on the ontology browser, and the system will automatically find the corresponding SUMO concepts.

Furthermore, see the
Infoplease Dictionary (pretty comprehensive), the
Ultralingua Dictionary and -last, but not least, Microsoft®'s ;-)
Encarta Dictionary (like every other product of the same origin almost indispensable, ergo, of virtually immeasurable value for consumers worldwide ;-).

In order to encourage laziness ;-) there is a variety of special, meta-searchengine-like provisions for vocabulary-search throughout a huge number of linguistic online sources: glossaries, dictionaries and encyclopedia. First and foremost, see the utmost valuable hyperlinked
Google-Labs Glossary. Furthermore, there is
Free Dictionary.com (really recommendable, abundance of valuable cross references), the integrated project
Dictionary.com, along with Thesaurus.com and Reference.com, the inegrated
Word IQ Dictionary, along with the Word IQ Encyclopedia and the Word IQ Thesaurus, the inegrated
Brainy Dictionary, along with the Brainy Encyclopedia and
1Look Dictionaries (along with Rhymezone.com "to find a word's rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more").

Yet some more highly interesting, utmost valuable online resources for deepening your knowledge and understanding of the English language: the
Alphabetical Index of Words featured in A Word A Day "the music and magic of words, that's what A Word A Day (AWAD) is about, a community of more than 600,000 linguaphiles in at least 200 countries", the
Wordwizard.com "for lovers of the English language", who might "need some help writing a tricky letter or other writing project, or just wish to share some interesting aspect of the English language with like-minded people", the
English Test Net (lots of test materials to evaluate your level of passive knowledge of the English language),
Using English (which provides "a large collection of ESL (English as a Second Language) resources for students, teachers, learners and academics") and the
Advanced Dictionary Skills Program by the English Language Center of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University "the aim of this site is to save you time and improve your English" ;-).

If you intend to consult encyclopedic sources rather than dictionaries, you might try a legend at its lifetime
Wikipedia.org, like the Open Directory Project a huge worldwide interactive project, which offers vertical (themes) and horizontal (languages) virtual spaces that are really easy to enter but sometimes tough to leave ;-). As a counterpart to Wikipedia which ought to be considered a highly dynamic source (in the most true sense of the word,) there ist the venerable
Encyclopedia Britannica, offering a free concise Encyclopdia along with a premium area with lots and lots of articles which can - at least to a certain extent - be followed free of charge. And then, see the
1911 Encyclopedia that is based on what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written: the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in 1911. Furthermore, there is
Free Definition.com, the
Columbia Encyclopedia via bartleby.com and via yahoo.com which yields a vast range of topics, with more than 80,000 hypertext cross-references. Another source:
Encyclopedia.com a free service of High Beam® Research (formerly known as eLibrary.com).

Leaving standardized language and jumping into the realm of slang? See both relevant American interactive sources: the
Urban Dictionary and the
Pseudo-Dictionary. Besides that, there is a British source, the
Dictionary of English Slang and Colloquialisms by Ted Duckworth for looking up the meaning of various slang words you come across.
To close the circle and focus on words which originate in the realm of slang and gradually find way into standardized language, see
The Word Spy by Paul McFedries. Akin to slang originating colloquialisms (informal expressions) are neologisms (newly and deliberately coined words). With regards to that particular subject, search the
Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms.

As a monolingual Dutch source, see the most recommendable
Dutch Words.nl and the
VanDale Dictionary of Contemporary Dutch online (not very comprehensive). For etymologic research purposes with regard to the Dutch language you might try the
Calisch Dictionary of the Dutch Language (edited in 1864).

If you are looking for a monolingual German dictionary you have a variety of sources available. At first, see the highly recommendable English language site:
Dictionary of German Morphology the "Morphology Browser, a tool for language experts, which integrates a whole range of functionalities into one single application". And then, see the
German Vocabulary Lexicon provided by the Leipzig University (With the Leipzig Lexicon you have the surplus opportunity to track a vast number of English, French and Dutch connotations via collocations and associations, see and try the drop-down menu at the top.), the
Xipolis Dictionary,
Elexiko Dictionary,
Wahrig's German Dictionaries. Do you intend to track etymologic roots of modern German terms and phrases? Then you have the most valuable historic
German dictionary by Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm online (click Online DWB aufschlagen at the upper right hand side of the interface!) the
German dictionary of legal terms (a huge general facsimile database which does contain much more than legal etymology by its very own potential), the historic
Meyer's Conversational Lexicon (edited in 1890),
Zedler's Comprehensive Universal Lexicon (edited in 1811) along with
Adelung's historic Dictionary of High-German at your disposal. Again, if you are looking for contemporary German encyclodepdic and lexical rather than dictionary sources, see the
German Branch of Wikipedia, the
Net-Lexicon,
Uniprotokolle Universal German Lexicon and
Infobitte! Universal German Online Encyclopedia.

When it comes to bilingual sources, try the remarkable
Leipzig Dictionary Englich/German, German/English (see the comprehensive monolingual Leipzig online dictionaries further above),
Leo English/German, German/English Dictionary, provided by the Technical University of Munich/Bavaria,
Linguadict English/German, German/English Dictionary, with about half a million entries (also German/French, French/German). Furthermore, the
Lingenio English/German, German/EnglishDictionary, the
Dicdata English/German, German/English Dictionary (also German/French, French/German, German/Italian, Italian/German) the
QuickDic Dictionary English/German/English (contains over 250,000 words and idioms in each language, and "some features which can be a great help" such as Phonetic transcriptions of frequently used words in both languages) and the interactive
Dictionary Info English/German/English (translations and synonyms, especially useful due to an integrated spelling corrector e.g. provision of spelling suggestions in the case of errors and typos). Moreover, see
Collins English/German, German/English English/Italian, Italian/English, English/French, French/English Dictionary via wordreference.com. The latter references are especially usefull due to expedient examples. And then, there is
Spectrum English/Dutch and Dutch/English (see the column at the lower right hand side of the interface),
"La Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique", English/French and French/English,
"Diccionarios general de la lengua Española" English/Spanish and Spanish/English (first and foremost a monolingual Spanish dictionary but also Spanish/French, French/Spanish, Spanish/German and German/Spanish),
Cambridge Klett English/Frech, French/English and
Cambridge Klett English/Spanish, Spanish/English (about 150,000 entries each),
"Garzanti Linguistica" English/Italian, Italian/English (first and foremost a monolingual Italian dictionary) and the
Online English/Russian, Russian/English Dictionary.
Usually parallel and ideally supplemental, you will want to consult the
ARTFL Project: English/French, French/English Dictionary, the
Probert English/French, French/English Ecyclopedia,
Probert English/Spanish, Spanish/English Ecyclopedia and last, but certainly not least the
American Heritage English/Spanish, Spanish/English Dictionary online accessible via yahoo.com.
There is also a project of an interactive bilingual dictionary going on:
Dict CC English/German dictionary with currently (August 2003) roughly 345,000 entries.

Searching for bilingual sources Greek - contemporary English (and vice versa) or Latin - contemporary English (and vice versa), see the
Perseus Greek and Latin Dictionary "Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Perseus' primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible." (See also the Glossarium Anglico - Latinum link further below.)

Among multilingual sources I found only very few offering (nearly) as many entries as needed in order to achieve sound translation results:

To begin with, there is the commonly and widely known tool (terminology and phraseology-database)
Eurodic Autom provided by the
Internal Translation Service of the European Commission available for everybody via the World Wide Web.
Rather less known is the fact that, like the Commission, the
Internal Translation Service of the European Council provides its tool, called
TIS consilium, to the public at large.
TIS consilium offers an intuitive graphical user interface (gui), and it offers, forsooth, an impressive functional range on subject areas.
Well, unfortunately, there is barely any entry available at the European Council´s TIS (Terminological Information System) on the other hand.
Reading the preliminary statement of Eurodic Autom and TIS consilium one might ask if just one common user interface and database would not supply in the need of all professional translators within the entire European Union. Given the fact that even the
Language Support Division of the European Parliament operates a translation tool, under code name "Euterpe" (until early 2003 accessible via the Net), which relies on a solitary database, this is all the more true. Now, suppose a whole lot more entries to be available in one common EU-terminology and phraseology-database, would it not be all too good to be true?
However, as we all know, after all, economy does not have utmost priority there in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, neither has efficiency.
Anyway, as another multilingual resource see the interactive
KudoZ Glossaries (so far, rather poor), the Finnish
Terminology Forum (very many language combinations available), the new
Interglot and the new French project
Lexicool.com.

For people looking for technical dictionaries, translators' resources and glossaries, there is the sophisticated
Glossarist for subject-oriented glossary-search. You may have a look then at the unequalled sites of the Dane Peter Spitz,
Peter's Dictionary and the American Frank Dietz
Glossary Links (beyond any doubt, two of the most useful link lists throughout the Web).

With regard to language, law and finance, and IT, I would like to refer to the most comprehensive, and thus most valuable and thus most recommendable resources:

For linguistic terminology, see the
SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, the
Lexicon of Linguistics by the renowned Dutch University of Leiden (especially with regard to phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics), and then there is the Wikipedia
Free Linguistics Encyclopedia, finally there is the
Language Lexicon (no update anymore).

For legal/juridical terminology, see the contemporary online law dictionary sources
Wiktionary Legal Terms,
Merriam Webster's Dictionary of Law (via Findlaw.com, Glossary of legal terms via Lawyers.com offers an even newer version), the
Legal Definitions Legal Encyclopaedia and
Mojo Law's Dictionary of Legal Terms & Phrases. See also the fairly comprehensive
Lectric Law Lexicon, the well-known Canadian
Duhaime Law Dictionary, the
Law.com Dictionary,
Plain English A to Z Guide to Legal Phrases and
Free Legal Resources in Plain English.
With
Nolo Everybody's Legal Dictionary yo have some other, in no way lesser source to explore.
Moreover, see the (historic)
John Bouvier's Law Dictionary (revised sixth edition from 1856) and
William C. Anderson's Dictionary of Law, a dictionary and compendium of American and English jurisprudence, published in 1893. In order to understand past and present law, you must first understand the British and American definitions of words used and based in Common Law prior to 1900. See the "Ongoing Anderson" dictionary of law as source of law consisting of judicial definitions and explanations of words, phrases and maxims.

See also the Law History links at eulenhaupt.com in the latter context.

For terminology of international law, see the
International Law Dictionary & Directory. With regard to legal abbreviations, see the
Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.

For financial terminology, see at first Campbell R. Harvey's
Hypertextual Finance Glossary. And then, there is Investopedia's
Financial Lexicon, the
Yahoo Financial Glossary and the
Probert Money Matters Encyclopedia for "everything to do with money, including currencies, commerce, and economics". Arguably, four most comprehensive financial dictionaries that can be consulted via the internet. However, with the Ventureline
Dictionary of Accounting Terms you have another resource for accounting matters. Searching bank or investment words? With Bankrate's
Financial Glossary and Investorwords'
Financial Glossary you have even more online financial dictionary sources at your dispolsal. And, although focused on Ausies, you will be able to examine the
Oxford Dictionary of Investment Terms via Invesco.co.au. Moreover, see "the" trademark
Glossary Agent (an agent of/for/about glossaries, insn't it ;-) a: "unique, (must be, mustn't it ;-) annotated gateway to online monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual glossaries of interest to professionals in insurance, reinsurance, risk management, employee benefits, healthcare, and related fields such as law and financial services". Last, but not least see the bilingual English - German
Technical Dictionary for Economy, Trade and Finance (with roughly 50,000 entries).

If you want to track IT terminology, see the
TechWeb Encyclopedia, the
High Tech Dictionary by computeruser.com, the renowned
PC-Webopedia, the
Foldoc Free Online Dictionary of Computing and the InstantWeb Online Computing Dictionary, respectively, the
Hutchinson Dictionary of Computers, Multimedia and the Internet, the
Whatis.com IT Encyclopedia and Learning Center or the
Netlingo Internet Dictionary.



Ever asked yourself: what the h*** does this bl**** abbreviation mean? ;-) Well, in such an uneasy situation you have a bunch of web-addresses: the
Acronymfinder, the
Stands4.com-list of acronyms and abbreviations (among other fields, expressly recommendable for law-related abbreviations), the German based
Berlin University accronyms an abbreviation list, the
Accronym Server and/or the
"Glossary of the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve" available, to ensure for unabbreviated relief.



Next, I´d like to draw your attention on a range of Internet style guides and grammar tutorials, respectively.
If you strive to achieve better style with your personal writing, explore the
English Style Guide by the internal translation service of the European Commission (mentioned already further above) the
American Heritage Book of English Usage by Bartleby.com or Gary B. Larson's
Style Manual, the
Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr., the
Plain Language Online Training or the website
Plain Language as another guide for writing user-friendly documents. Furthermore worth to be mentioned in this context:
An Alphabetical List of Commonly Misused Words by the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the
Times Online Style Guide, the
Guardian Style Guide, the
Economist Style Guide, the Carnegie Mellon
Writer's Style Guide and
Common Errors by a pretty obscure author, settled in the -just as obscure ;-) Principality of Liechtenstein.

If it is about English grammar you might consult the
Glossary of Grammatical Terms as initial or parallel step for further investigations. Supposedly the most popular grammar website is the IGE,
Internet Grammar of English, provided by the
University College of London (UCL). The UCL´s Internet Grammar is an online course in English grammar written primarily for university undergraduates. The UCL hopes that it will be useful though to everyone who is interested in the English language. IGE, a comprehensive grammar tutorial does not assume any prior knowledge of (English) grammar.
Another well-known, valuable English grammar source, even more comprehensive than the UCL´s Internet Grammar:
Owl, the Online Writing Lab by the Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (beyond grammar especially useful for style matters), the
Lydbury Grammar Discussion Board and
Ask the Grammar Expert (Jargon Buster) as part of the Oxford dictionaries (mentioned above).
Other recommendable reference sources for English grammar:
Modern English Grammar by Daniel Kies,
Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch,
Guide to Grammar and Writing by Charles Darling,
Common Errors in English by Paul Brian,
Language Arts by Tina M. Sawyer, the
Online English Grammar by Anthony Hughes,
Daily Grammar by Bill Johanson, the
Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus, the
Business English Grammar Exercises by Pearson Brown, the
English Exercises by Lillian Hurst,
Grammar, Punctuation and Capitalization by Mary K. McCaskill,
World Wide Words by Michael Quinion (about the major differences between British and American English), the
American·British, British·American Dictionary by Jeremy Smith (ditto) and Bartleby's
Columbia Guide to Standard American English by Kenneth G. Wilson.

For Comparative Studies of English worldwide, see
The International Corpus of English, by the Hong Kong University's department of English.

For Dutch grammar, there is a number of provisions for grammar questions in particular as well as such for those keen on improving their knowledge of Dutch via the WWW in general:
Learn Dutch (remarkable resource for learners of the Dutch language with special attention for pronounciation, among many exercises ,the site offers sound files that you may download and listen to), the
Taalthuis Online Dutch Course, the
Nederlands Support Pages for VSL Dutch by the Australian Dutch language school,
an interesting newsgroups about the Dutch language, the
MSN-group: Wat betekent dit woord? and the
Yahoo-group: Nederlands, the
Taaladviesdienst (in Dutch) and the linklist of the
Dutch Electronic Subject Service.
Moreover, there is a discourse about the
Dutch Language (in English) made available by Ger Koole from Suriname, offering very many practical examples and exercises, the same is true with
Introduction to the Dutch Language (in English) by Ruud Rietvink. Basically, such a discourse must be seen as a step by step instruction on how to use the Dutch language rather than a quick reference for a particular grammar problem. Especially for the latter, there is a rather new provision by Bieneke Berendsen
Dutch Online Grammar Course.

For German grammar, there is yet another
Glossary of Grammatical Terms by Hermann Menge, (in German, not meant to be for German grammar in particular, but rather for grammar as such). And then, there is the highly recommendable (English-language) site
German Dictionaries and Grammars a very well designed user interface and user guidance, beyond German grammar, e.g. inflection rules a valuable German online dictionary source (see above). Furthermore, Archana Hinduja offers
German Grammar on the Web, a chart that contains reference and exercise pages on a variety of German grammar points.
Furthermore,
German Online from Oklahoma State University,
German Web Exercises by Andreas Lixl-Purcell and
About the German Language as part of the well-known About directory, with lots of topics not only about German language but also about German literature, verse, etc. Finally, there is -as an oddity of its own ;-), a "speech error database" by the German linguist Richard Wiese, who compiled a (long) list of grammatical oddities of non-native sources he came across:
German Errors. Oh yes, I know, you can also observe many language oddities with Germans in Britain or America, e.g. women who are getting, or even worse becoming babies, rather than having babies ;-).

For more common German and Dutch language resources see the German Language Links and Dutch Language Links at eulenhaupt.com.

Interest in language history? You could approach the most valuable
Online Etymology Dictionary, issued by Douglas Harper and the
Online Century Dictionary by Jeffery A. Triggs. In order to verify the Latin root of contemporary English terms, see the comprehensive
Glossarium Anglico-Latinum by Gualterius Redmond and
Global Glossary of the Classics Technology Center ("an authoritative, scholarly, and reliable. source for authentic information on the Greco-Roman world"). And then, there are
Old English Pages, supplied by the Georgetown University, Washington DC,
Old English Lessons by the Canadian University of Calgary, a
Middle English Compendium by the University of Michigan, a
Middle English Collection by the University of Virginia, Bosworth and Toller's
Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Bright's
Anglo-Saxon Reader,
King Alfred's Grammar Book (sounds so odd, doesn't it ;-) and the
Germanic Lexicon Project (the former Indo-European Language Resources) by Sean Crist, for sources, dictionaries etc., mainly about Old English but also about Old Dutch, Old High-German, Old Friesian, Old Islandic, Gotic, among other historic (germanic and other) language sources and
Titus "the" thesaurus of Indo-European languages. Titus, is a joint project of different European universities. It offers lots of general linguistic informationen, and, in particular, a search engine for various Indo-European text an language materials, moreover, links, sources, materials, news, lexica, etc. and a bibliography of publications concerning comparative linguistics. In this latter context you may also find the
Indo-European Etymological Dictionary by the departement of comparative linguistics of the Leiden University, the
Bibliomania Hobson Jobson Dictionary (see also two other Biblomania dictionary references mentioned further below) and
Wordorigins.org worth visiting.

Found something suitable?
If not, you could check one of the following sites for linguists' and translators' common resources:
Ilove Languages,
Foreign Word,
Proz.com (see further above),
Translators' Reference
Translators' Cafe.

For mere investigative purposes, you could explore
Scirus.com for science-specific searching. If it is about language, verse and literature specific research purposes, see the renowned
Project Gutenberg which makes "lots of famous and important texts freely available to everyone in the world" and the
Redlightgreen Library that "helps you locate the most important books and other research materials in your area of interest, Redlightgreen is a nonprofit membership corporation of universities, national libraries, archives, and other memory institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. Any more suitable bibliographical web-addresses desired? See
Bibliomania Grocott's Quotations - Alpha,
Bibliomania Brewer's Phrase & Fable and the
World Lecture Hall for free online course materials from around the world, although apparently, no update takes place there any more. As this latter project may have come to an end, a new one just emerges (January 2004):
Print.Google "Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites". Moreover, there is the valuable
E Server, a virtual place where writers, artists, editors and scholars gather to publish and discuss their works. If -at the end it is about rhetorics, check the
Handbook of Rhetorical Devices or if it is about mere clichés you will want to search the
Cliché Finder.

Some more translators' resources: the
LAI Companion
Translation Directory (see the valuable articles) and the
Translation Journal. Finally, you might try the
Linguist List (most recommendable resource for linguistic research objectives),
Introduction to Linguistics,
Blackwell's Linguistics Resources (very well designed, structured and comprehensive), the
Humbul Humanities Hub of Linguistics (hosted by the Oxford University) and the discussion forum of the renowned British
Institute of Linguistics, furthermore, the
Linguistics Links Database, by the department of General Linguistics at the University of Passau/Germany. Especially with regard to morphology, see the
Morphology Compilation of dictionary.com. And then, really recommendable, very well maintained, the
Linguistic Courses ... Resources by the Austin/Texas University, with regard to Morphology, Syntax, Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics plus Psycholinguistics (one among other sections: "animal communication" addresses questions such as "Could Bonzo go to College?" and "An internet chat with Koko the gorilla" ;-). You see, linguistics can be fun, so can law ;-).
Furthermore you could quite easily perform a tutorial search:
TutorGig Encyclopedia, Tutorials Translation,
TutorGig Encyclopedia, Tutorials Linguistics (or search for tutorials about any conceivable subject),
Yahoo's Linguistics and Human Languages List, the Omniglot
Guide to Writing Systems (index of all the writing systems and common, contemporary languages) or the
Language Museum.

Well, it is all about language here, isn't it. Spoken language, however, is just one way of communication among human individuals out of several. If you want to know for instance what your elected people's representatives really have to "say" on TV or your "dearest fellow colleagues" ;-) really think about the latest proposal you are offering in the corporate meeting, go and scrutinize the
Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs and Body Language Cues.

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© 2008 Michael Eulenhaupt LL.M. (Amsterdam)