Translating Text Fragments

ABBYY Lingvo can help you to translate not only words and phrases, but also text fragments.

• Lingvo can find set phrases in a text fragment (e.g. verb+particle combinations) and translate them. This is particularly useful when translating from a foreign language and when you do not know whether the words should be translated separately or as one word combination.

  Translating from a foreign language

  The general sequence of actions is as follows:

  1. Select a text fragment in your current application.

  Important! The text fragment cannot be longer than 32 words.

  2.    Press Ctrl+Ins+Ins or Ctrl+N+N or drag and drop the text fragment onto the Lingvo main window. The Translations dialog box will open.

  3.    Use the full-text search feature to look up words and phrases whose translations have not been found at step 2.

  Suppose you need to translate the following sentence into Russian:

  1. Going through steps 1 and 2 will provide you with the following cards: .
  2. Now run full-text search to find translations for .

  Put the found translations together and you get .

• Lingvo can look for translations of phrases for which there are no separate cards but which occur in examples or in comments. This is particularly useful when translating into a foreign language when you do not no whether a given word combination must be translated word for word or as a set phrase (as in the case of "выплеснуть гнев" or "крутой нрав" for example).

  Translating into a foreign language

  The general sequence of actions is as follows:

  1. Translate word combinations and verbs with prepositions.
  2. If no cards for a verb with a preposition have been found, open the card of the corresponding preposition and find the required translation.
  3. Translate the rest of the words by opening their cards.

  Suppose you need to translate the following sentence into English: Ожидается, что во втором квартале цены на нефть вырастут, так как страны-члены ОПЕК пообещали снизить уровень добычи.

  We see that ожидается does not have a separate entry in the dictionary, but we can perform a full text search. We can ask Lingvo to find the exact match for ожидается or even for ожидается, by going to Tools>Options>Search where we have to uncheck the option Find all word forms.  After we have performed a full-text search  () we see that ожидается translates as It’s expected that/Smth. Is expected to… We open the card for второй квартал and translate it as second quarter. We perform a full-text search for цены на нефть and see from the examples that it translates as oil prices or the price of oil. Note that you might wish to tweak search criteria in Tools>Options>Search to find all the occurrences of цены на нефть in Lingvo. We open the cards for the other words we wish to translate.

  Now we can combine the results and translate the whole sentence into English:

   

  Oil prices are expected to go up in the second quarter because OPEC countries have pledged to cut production.