Searching the dictionary

When you enter the dictionary in Glosbe you see an alphabetically ordered list of phrases available. This can be misleading, as Glosbe does not necessary work like a traditional dictionary: we provide much more data than there is on the list. All thanks to translation memories. There may be phrases, that we don't have translated in a dictionary fashion but you still can find correct translation by analyzing the translation memories. So if you need to find a translation of a phrase - search for it, no matter if it is present on the word list.

Glosbe search tries to be as intelligent as possible. Imagine, that you want to find word "spać" (notice "ć") and you don't have "ć" on your keyboard. If you enter "spac" (with "c" in place of "ć") Glosbe should be able to correctly suggest you checking the translation of "spać". This is especially useful feature if you need to search for phrases in completely different alphabet, like in case of Russian or Japanese. Just write the transliterated form of the phrase.

Translation memory

Glosbe searches translation memory when you check the dictionary. Translation memory is a huge database of translated sentences. They might be a very useful illustration of word usage. Unfortunately we don't have examples for all languages yet, for some we have very small database. We are still working on this. If you have your translation memory you can share: please send us.

Anyway, searching translation memories can be tricky when you search for multi-word phrase like "cat food". You might be interested in different searching modes:

Words may appear

Translations containing word "cat" or word "food", preferably containing both of them. This is the default behavior, just search for cat food to get the results

Words must appear one after another

Translations containing words "cat food" one after another. To do you can also wrap your query with quotes, i.e. search for "cat food" with quotes

Phrase in multiple languages

Some users need to find out information how does some phrase translate to multiple languages, for example you may want to say "I love you" (English) to your wife in 100 languages. There are two ways of doing it:

• Visit page /en/en/I love you, where "en" is a language code of English. On the bottom of the page you'd see a list of links, pointing to translations in several languages.
• Glosbe stores some translations in a very clever way, we use something we call 'ideas'. You can read more at the editor manual. Anyway to find out translations of "I love you" check this I love you idea page.

Second step translations

Glosbe contains big amount of translation data. Sometimes it may happen that you ask for translating a word A from for example French to Latin, that we don't have in our French-Latin dictionary. But it sometimes happens, that we have word A translated in French-English dictionary, and the destination word B is translated in English-Latin dictionary to C. Probably A can be translated to C, so we show C on the word translation page. However, as this translation was never confirmed by an user be very careful before you decide to use this word. To help you to decide whether this is a correct translation or not we display also the word B, which was an "in between" word.