Gabler Verlag has recently launched
an online version of the
Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon which contains around 25,000 entries on
economic terms in German. Gabler approached us prior to the release of the
online version to suggest the following cooperation which we very much welcomed:
Gabler links the entries in the Wirtschaftslexikon to our German-English
dictionary,
LEO provides a link to the entries in the Wirtschaftslexikon behind the
buttons in the German column of all our
dictionaries.
We hope that definitions of terms such as
Gläubigerausschuss or
Steuerausweichung
will prove valuable for many of our users - including native German speakers.
While our dictionaries already contained a wide range of economic terms, some
gaps have become evident through the addition of the links to the
Wirtschaftslexikon. We will try to fill these bit by bit. As is usually
the case with good cooperations, the full potential will therefore only be
realised over time :-)
Thank you for the words!
17 June 2009
Quite a few months have gone by since we last expressed our most sincere thanks to all the enthusiasts out there who make such a valuable contribution to our dictionaries whether it be through the forums, or via e-mails.
It is not only the suggestions for new entries but also the accompanying research and the correction proposals, as well as the discussions on individual dictionary entries; all these contributions are very valuable indeed.
We would also like to express sincere thanks to all those that have donated extensive technical word lists and thus supported us on our way to becoming a "universal" (well, almost (-:) dictionary.
To name just a few recent contributors: Dip.-Ing. Harald
Holzapfel and ProcessEng Engineering GmbH have kindly given us permission to include their recently published
Glossary of Combustion
(ISBN 978-3902655011) in our German-English dictionary; the
Eidgenössische Bundesamt für Gesundheit BAG (Swiss office of public health) has provided us with its German/English/French/Italian Terminology of the Swiss drugs policy; Dr H. Gardner McTaggart has contributed German/English/Italian word lists from the fields of archaeology, architecture and history of art, fortress design and construction, and weaponry; Dr E. Pelzing has donated German-Spanish and some German-English glossaries which have significantly increased the number of entries in fields such as environmental protection, nuclear power, alternative energy and coking; and last but not least we would like to mention J.-P. Cronimus and his inexhaustible supply of example sentences for the German-French dictionary.
Even if we cannot name all contributors individually, we are equally grateful to all those that we have not explicitly mentioned here.
German-Russian dictionary in preparation -- LEO teams up with ABBYY Europe
18 February 2009
Following exceptionally positive and constructive talks with
ABBYY Europe GmbH,
a cooperation agreement has been signed under which ABBYY provides
a generous starting base for the creation of a German-Russian dictionary.
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to our negotiation partners for
their generous gesture!
ABBYY Europe GmbH not only provides electronic dictionaries under
the Lingvo
brand, it is also one of the leading companies in the field of OCR software
(software that recognises characters/letters captured by a scanner). We look
forward to a very fruitful collaboration!
In breach of our usual tradition of announcing news of a new dictionary
only shortly before the launch, we have adopted a different approach this time
and have decided to inform the many users who have asked for a German-Russian
dictionary over the past months that the foundation stone has been laid
(and hopefully this announcement will also forestall further questions about a
Russian dictionary (-: ).
Please understand that it will take some weeks for us to edit the content
and make the necessary technical adjustments, especially because, after Chinese, the Cyrillic alphabet represents yet more new territory for us. However, the electronic ABBYY Lingvo dictionaries are already available for
download
to your PC or mobile phone.
Our users' wishlist featured countless other languages apart from Russian but, while we would love to start any number of new dictionaries, our resources are
limited and the setting up of a new dictionary involves a great deal of time and work. What is more, we cannot create a new dictionary from nothing and require sufficient content on which we can build.
New release of Lion software
13 January 2009
First of all we would like to inform all users that are not yet acquainted with
Lion
that this software offers an easy solution to send queries to the LEO dictionaries from almost all Windows applications. Please click the above link for details.
Version 3.0 has been available for some time, and after some improvements and bug fixes
Thorsten Schleinzer, the developer of Lion, has now given the green light for version 3.0.1 to be officially released.
Several bugs of version 3.0 have been eliminated which means the latest version only offers advantages :-)
Unlike version 2 the new version also supports Windows Vista along with previous versions of Windows.
The software supports all dictionaries apart from Chinese for which we will be able to offer a solution once we have changed the encoding for all dictionaries to Unicode.
As of version 3 Lion can be downloaded free of charge for private use and is no longer sold as shareware to private users. Corporate customers and research institutions will still be required to pay a licence fee and we appeal to our users' honesty to get in touch with us if they are liable to pay the fee as the developing and hosting costs on our part are quite considerable.
For more information about Lion please click the link mentioned above where you will find the
Lion manual
(please also find the link to Lion in the navigation bar below the search field).
Improved server availability
05 December 2008
A generous offer from our IT provider,
IP Exchange GmbH,
has enabled us to set up a second location in Nuremberg to which we have moved
some of the servers that were previously located in Munich. Both locations now
host the same service components and are sufficiently equipped to ensure that
queries to our dictionaries can be routed to the second location in the
(unlikely) event of a downtime at one site.
For those of our users who are interested in technical details: after
completion of the necessary adjustments, the dictionary software will be
handling translation queries on six servers (instead of four), the forum and vocabulary-trainer database will be running on four (instead of three), and 'www' on two (instead of one) servers. At both locations, a load balancer will ensure
that queries are evenly distributed to the dictionary servers.
Once again we would like to extend our most sincere thanks to our partners at IP Exchange for their offer and the excellent collaboration!
New language trainer and co-operation with Linguatec
29 October 2008
Almost a year ago we started developing our vocabulary trainer into a more
powerful language trainer. The word finished will probably never apply
to this kind of tool seeing that not only language is subject to constant
change, but also the way we learn and the possibilities the WWW offers.
So we simply decided to release an official announcement regarding the latest
developments on which we worked over the last months.
Below you will find a
brief summary of the most important new features of the
vocab trainer.
Detailed instructions can be found in the
user guide:
Apart from learning vocabulary on your own, you can now also team up with
other users and set up a study group to share word lists, create and
solve exercises, put together lessons and communicate with each other via the
group's own discussion forum.
In addition to the two existing vocabulary study modes, the new trainer version also offers a slide show mode. Other new features include printing word pairs
on flash cards or as a list, and much more besides.
Study groups can be organised as teacher/student groups or they can be
set up to give all members the same access/editing rights. In the first case,
the "teacher" provides content for "students" to use as learning material, in
the second case all members may contribute content and work with it.
The different types of learning activities currently include reading exercises, dictations, translation exercises, gap-fill exercises and multiple choice tests.
Uploading content couldn't be easier and is largely a matter of copying and
pasting from documents on your computer (for details please read the user
guide). Each exercise can be complemented with a list of words that are relevant
to the exercise for ease of understanding. Exercises may be uploaded as
stand-alone exercises or as parts of a unit.
For certain exercises the software highlights mistakes automatically and
displays the solution (dictation, gap-fill exercise and multiple choice test).
For other exercises, such as translations, users can view a sample solution.
Furthermore, completed exercises can be sent back to the tutor/peer who set the exercise who in turn can mark the exercise and return the corrected version
to the sender.
A co-operation agreement with Linguatec GmbH allows us to provide a read aloud feature for reading exercises,
translations and dictations in different languages. Although
Voice
Reader generates synthetic speech, the quality is remarkable and comes
quite close to human speech.
The read aloud feature is available for all languages for which we offer
dictionaries (for Chinese the text needs to be in simplified Chinese).
Voice Reader allows you to listen to a dictation without
interruptions or with pauses and repetitions so that you can easily type along while listening to the text.
Alternatively, users may also record their own dictations which they can then upload as MP3 files.
To improve ease of use, the check boxes to select word pairs and the corresponding Save button at the top left-hand side of the results table are now displayed whether you are logged in or not. In case you
are not logged in you will be redirected to the login screen when you click
Save.
If this brief overview has made you want to learn more about the vocabulary trainer you will find detailed instructions in the user guide which you can also print out as a PDF.
We hope you enjoy working with the new language trainer!
Your LEO team
An Online Service by LEO GmbH
German-English
Deutsch-Französisch
Deutsch-Spanisch
Deutsch-Italienisch
Deutsch-Chinesisch
buttons in the German column of all our
dictionaries.
