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Linguee is a web service that provides an online dictionary for a number of language pairs. Unlike similar services, such as LEO, Linguee incorporates a search engine that provides access to large amounts of bilingual, translated sentence pairs, which come from the World Wide Web. As a translation aid, Linguee therefore differs from machine translation services like Babelfish and is more similar in function to a translation memory.
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Technology
Linguee uses specialized webcrawlers to search the Internet for appropriate bilingual texts and to divide them into parallel sentences. The paired sentences identified undergo automatic quality evaluation by a human-trained machine learning algorithm that estimates the quality of translation. The user can set the number of pairs using a fuzzy search, access, and the ranking of search results with the previous quality assurance and compliance is influenced by the search term. Users can also rate translations manually, so that the machine learning system is trained continuously.
History
The concept behind Linguee was conceived in the fall of 2007 by former Google employee Dr. Gereon Frahling and developed in the following year along with Leonard Fink. The business idea was awarded in 2008 with the main prize of the competition, founded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Germany). In April 2009, the web service was available to the public. Linguee is operated by the Linguee GmbH based in Cologne.