A couple of years back, someone gave a link to an online Italian dictionary: You set it up so that by simply typing in "ie Englishword" you get a pretty decent Italian translation of that word.

I had it set up on my old laptop, but can't now seem to locate it, and I miss it!

Ecco!

Grazie mille, Paolo.

Paolo, will that work only for Firefox users? What about IE6?

Doru, I fear it is a Firefox only feature.

quote:

Originally posted by paolo:
Doru, I fear it is a Firefox only feature.

"Elitism" ... Empires were toppled for less!

ma fin che durano:

I like www.wordreference.com. It has a lot of nice features like, ability to pronounce the word and the ability to conjugate verbs. Also all you need to do is to get close to the spelling of a word and it will present you with a list of the possible words that fit your poor spelling. Very useful feature for me.

quote:

I like www.wordreference.com.

Agree! With that in one tab and [URL=Babel Fish]http://babelfish.altavista.com/[/URL] in another, I can usually get by. ---Marlene

quote:

ma fin che durano

translation, please.

Grazie,

jan

but till they [the empires] last [enjoy them]

quote:

Originally posted by spinnaker:
I like www.wordreference.com. It has a lot of nice features like, ability to pronounce the word and the ability to conjugate verbs. Also all you need to do is to get close to the spelling of a word and it will present you with a list of the possible words that fit your poor spelling. Very useful feature for me.

I agree. I have it on my toolbar and use it at least once a day. It is excellent and easy to use.

Wordreference has super useful features including a very very interesting forum with people giving really valid help, but the translations are not very accurate.. so do not rely on that if you're reading something really important!
My frist choice is always the Hoepli on-line.

Thanks for the reference. It's always nice to have. Now, if only someone would make a word-reference-like capability for a handheld. ---Marlene

For verb conjugations I keep this site bookmarked and use it often:

http://www.italian-verbs.com/verbi-italiani.htm

Marlene, I have a small, hand-held, battery-operated Italian/English dictionary that I absolutely love. Sharp E320. Sometimes you can find it on ebay.it.

With the above two resources I find I have pretty much all my translating needs covered.

quote:

For verb conjugations I keep this site bookmarked and use it often:

http://www.italian-verbs.com/verbi-italiani.htm



Trouble is it doesn't tell you where the accent falls in the present tense, which I think is essential. See my post under the topic "CDs of verb conjugations".

Si Vasco, hai ragione. You are right.

http://www.italian-verbs.com/verbi-italiani.htm

does not help with pronunciation. I spend much of my time reading and writing Italian however, and so for myself, and these purposes, I find it to be an excellent resource.

I've been translating some 17th Century poetic Italian (a Monteverdi opera libretto) and have had my usual problems translating sometimes obscure verb forms that are just different enough from the infinitive to make them hard to research (in this case, it was the word "punse" - I know, it's not that obscure, but I still wasn't sure it was from pungere).

And then I came across wiktionary. It appears to be under the umbrella of wikipedia and is a great resource for translating from Italian in to English - especially those pesky, irregular verb forms. Actually it works for multiple languages - just enter the word in the search box, set the language to English, and it will give you the infinitive. The infintive will link to a detailed explanation of the verb and listing of all the forms.

Let me know what you think. Thanks.

David, that looks really useful. I'd stumbled across the dictionary before, but never stopped to play - and had no idea that it could do all that verb-linking. Thanks!

Jonathan

quote:

Originally posted by David:
I've been translating some 17th Century poetic Italian (a Monteverdi opera libretto)

Wow!

Yeah - actually, I'm teaching a new course this semester, one element of which deals with translating these difficult, old texts. And my students are going to be VERY happy today when I tell them as well!