What to Look for in a Spanish Translation Dictionary

What to Look for in a Spanish Translation Dictionary
by Clint Tustison
A Spanish translator's most prized possession is and always will be his or her Spanish translation dictionary. There are all sorts of dictionaries available for translators to choose from, and in fact, translators will very often have a number of different kinds of dictionaries to help them in their translation work.
In choosing dictionaries to use, one of the first questions that Spanish translators ask themselves is whether or not they should give up on printed Spanish translation dictionaries and only use online or electronic dictionaries, or whether or not they should use a combination of the two.
In reality, most professional translators will use some combination of printed and electronic Spanish translation dictionaries.
So what is a good combination of dictionaries to have? Well, it's important to remember that translators are usually specialized, meaning that they more often than not translate documents that are specific to one field or industry. At the same time, however, translators are often asked to do work outside their field of specialization and so will often take on more general jobs.
That then being said, the best thing a translator can do is to have both specialized dictionaries as well as general dictionaries, and to have both bilingual and monolingual versions of each. It is important to have both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries because the bilingual dictionaries usually only give you the equivalent word in another language, while the monolingual dictionaries will give you the definition of the word, in case you're not sure what it means in either language.
The other thing to consider is whether or not you should use electronic dictionaries or print dictionaries. Well, there are positives and negatives to both. Printed dictionaries have often been put through more extensive research and editing than online dictionaries, and while this is a good thing, it very often takes a longer time for printed dictionaries to be published than it does for online dictionaries to be posted on the web. Also, online dictionaries can more easily be updated with terminology, whereas printed dictionaries are not updated quite as often.
With online Spanish translation dictionaries, you should always know that there is a possibility that you could lose your connection to the Internet. What if you're in the middle of a very big translation and all of a sudden you lose access to your online specialized dictionary? Well, in that case, you wouldn't have to worry if you had a printed version right there at your desk that you could access.
So in the end, it's important to have both printed dictionaries and electronic ones, and to invest in both specialized and general Spanish translation dictionaries.