If you are involved in bilingual projects, you may often encounter the need to translate a technical term. Despite the knowledge you may or may not have, there is always a word that will not be in your English/French dictionary nor appropriately available through Google’s language tools.

So here’s a technique you can use for very uncommon words that uses the translating abilities of Canadian federal translators. All Canadian web documents must be published in both languages. Therefore any word you are searching that has been used on any government of Canada page will have been translated by a trained professional, not a piece of software.

For instance, if you were looking for the French name of the Longhorned beetle, type this into Google:

“Longhorned beetle” site:gc.ca

Using “site:gc.ca” with Google will restrict searches to Government of Canada websites (gc.ca). Follow through to the page, locate the term “Longhorned beetle” and make a mental note of its position in the general layout: it might be in the title or the fifth paragraph down, third sentence.

Then, using the masthead of the website, click on “Français” to get the French language version of the page, locate the equivalent sentence using the mental note you made in the previous step, and there you are: Longhorned beetle in French is “Longicorne asiatique”.

Use this technique for any French to English, or English to French translation of a keyword, small phrase or difficult technical term !