Search engines play really important role in daily life. How to take full advantages of them? Today, let us discuss how to use search engines to help with our translation materials.

Let’s take Google for example.
Google is a powerful search engine, founded up in 1999 by two Doctors of Stanford University: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. July in 2000, it took place of Inktomi as the search engine of Yahoo. September of the same year, it became one of search engines in China.

Google is really helpful in translating.
What I use most is the www.google.com.hk interface, so I just describe some tips on basis of this.

When enter into this website, we can see an interface like this:

This interface is Simple Chinese interface. If we want Traditional Chinese or English, we can click “中文（繁體）”or “English” , and get the corresponding pages.

Then we can search some words, phrases, background information and so on.

Read Also: Context – Major Factor to Consider When Translating

Take one word for example:

“Pipe” is usually translated as “管道”，but for drilling machine, what does this word refer to?

We can do a search on Google.

This “Pipe” is for drilling machine, so we can put “钻机” behind pipe to narrow the scope as below:

Then click “Google 搜索” .

We enter into this page:

By choosing and comparing, we finally found the translation of pipe for drilling machines, that is “钻杆”.

Thus, we’d better to know some context or background information during translation. It can better our understanding, and choose the most appropriate one.

Let’s take another phrase for example.

we meet with such a word: visa cooler.

At first sight, it is pretty strange, how could “visa” combined with “cooler”? Is it wrong in English? then we get to search for this on the internet.

According to the context, i guess it is an equipment for displaying the goods in the store. Since it is a kind of equipment, i decide to search for a picture of it. Then “image” in google help a lot.

When we come to the interface of google, we can see:

Then we click “Image” and enter “visa cooler”, enter into another screen:

From the above screen, we can roughly figure out what “visa cooler” refers to. It is definitely not “签证”，I suggest translating this into “冷藏展示柜” ，and of cource you can choose the best and most suitable one.