Download 73,016 terminology entries from Termcat’s database for the price of £12 or €14.50.

You can download a free sample of the first 1,000 entries (which covers the entire database on Video games and part of the Telecommunications database) here. Apart from the CSV format for importing into a CAT tool, the sample file also includes a version in Excel format so that if you don’t know how to import a CSV file into Excel you can visualise the data more easily.

On its website, Termcat provides 27 terminology databases in an open, xml format. Although it is an open-source format, the xml format used is not easy to import into a terminology database. Previous posts describe how to use Excel to convert the format, but even using that method is very complicated and takes many hours to do. It also requires Excel 2007, since Excel 2003 and earlier versions does not have enough rows (it is limited to just over 60,000) to enable the method to be used.

The databases contain 73,016 entries. All of the entries contain Catalan, and the vast majority also contain Spanish, English, and to a slightly lesser extent French. Termcat’s XML databases also have some entries in other languages. You can see the domains covered and which languages are covered for each domain here.

Since it is so difficult to import the XML files into computer-assisted translation tools, we at Anglo Premier are offering our converted version – which took us many hours to produce – for the price of just £10 or €12.

Our version contains all the entries available in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. Since the file is aimed at translators rather than terminologists, the data includes only the terms in each language (including all synonyms), as well as the domain (or subject), and the database from which it was extracted. The domain and database names are always in Catalan. They are usually the same, but some databases have various domains, for example, the “Videojocs” database has some records labelled as “Dispositius de joc” and others labelled as “Interacció i comunitat”. I would therefore recommend importing the database name into your CAT tool’s domain/subject field rather than the “domain”.

If you would be interested in having the entries that Termcat has produced in other languages (such as German and Italian) please contact us. If there is sufficient demand we will make a version with the other languages.

Buying the database

To purchase the product, please write to us using the contact form on our main site with your name in the subject line. In the body, please include your name, e-mail address, full address and, if applicable, your VAT number. Please also state your preferred payment method. We accept wire transfer to a British or Spanish account or Paypal or Skrill (formerly Moneybookers). We will reply with the necessary details to make the payment and a reference number for you to use. Once payment has been received you will receive a link to download the full file within 48 hours.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, goes the saying. If that includes the inside cover, never could this be more true than with the 2009 edition of the Diccionario politécnico de las lenguas española e inglesa. This very good dictionary has been spoilt by a spelling mistake on the inside cover.

I suspect spelling mistakes on the front and inside covers are more often than not the fault of the publisher, rather than the author. It’s not the first time I’ve come across one. In the Humanities library at the Autonomous University of Barcelona there is an English dictionary with “Lenguage Dictionary” on the front cover (I seem to have lost the photo I used to have). And then there was the infamous case of the Catalan translation of the Asterix book Le Ciel nous Tombe sur la Tête, which erroneously appeared as “El cel s’ens cau al damunt”. Like the French tomber, caure is not a reflexive verb. In Spanish, however, they use the reflexive verb caerse, hence the mistake. But the mistake is twofold, since even if Catalan did use the reflexive form caure’s, the correct combination of the pronouns se and ens is se’ns, not s’ens.

The English title of this technical dictionary is also spelt incorrectly inside the book.

Despite these mistakes, this is a very good dictionary and I would highly recommend it to anybody translating technical texts between Spanish and English. I just wonder how many people have read the online fragment provided on the publisher’s website and judged it by its inside cover.