Something About Encoding and On-line Dictionaries.

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Something About Encoding and On-line Dictionaries.
Andriy Zinchenko

Almost everybody whom I know has experienced problems with writing their e-mails in Ukrainian, Russian or languages other than English upon arriving in the US. Sometimes it is really hard to understand letters written in English characters, since different people interpret transliteration in a different way.
So, let's consider encoding problem. If it happens that you get e-mails that don't look as a result of a human activity no matter what encoding you apply, try postal decoders, abundant on the Internet. Here are links to some of them (if you do not like these particular ones you can easily find dozens of others online - just type "e-mail decoder" in one of the Russian search engines (I personally prefer www.yandex.ru):
· http://decoder.design.ru/
· http://www.mtrros.msk.ru/decode.htm
· http://kacap.chat.ru/decode.htm
Another problem is very essential to those who study foreign languages abroad. It is hard to find the way to type characters, specific for certain languages. If you want to write home in your native language but you do not have a corresponding keyboard you can use either virtual keyboard (e.g. http://www.wowwi.orc.ru/advise/index.html) or translit-translator. Following simple rules you can type any text in your own language. One of the best tools to translate your letters into Russian is
Abroadplanet Eng2Rus Decoder. If you want to write your letters in Ukrainian you can download universal Windows encoder from the following address: http://www.dynamo.kiev.ua/gb/Translit.zip .
International students also encounter the need for different kinds of dictionaries. There are many of them on the Internet, but only some of them are really good and worth attention. Some of them - for example http://babelfish.altavista.com/ do not have means to input language-specific characters.
When it comes to English-Russian dictionaries, we can clearly define a pair of leaders: http://lingvo.yandex.ru and http://www.multilex.ru/. Those two give almost all possible variations of translation for a particular word (including slang, buzzwords and scientific terms). Also, those dictionaries work in both directions: English-Russian and Russian-English. For this purpose "Lingvo" dictionary even has a Russian keyboard. From lingvo.yandex.ru you can also download Internet Explorer Plug-in, which will allow you to translate the word by highlighting it in the browser and clicking on the "translate" option in the context menu. A small pop-up window will give you the translation. If you have misspelled the word, "Lingvo" dictionary will give you possible variations of spelling.
Another dictionary worth mentioning is http://www.slovnyk.org/dic/index.html. It is slower than those mentioned above, but it provides translation in any directions from English, Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Russian.
The best dictionaries for the translation of Western-European languages are made by the Softissimo Corporation (Italy). They are:
www.reverso.net - this one has a means of inputting all language-specific characters;
http://tr.voila.fr/ - one of its good features - it translates into/from Russian.
A huge plus of these dictionaries is their ability to translate from different languages (not only from English). I should also admit a real good quality of translations. Almost the last note: the latter one works much more steady than "Reverso".
Other dictionaries worth trying:
· http://www.perevodov.net/
· http://www.freedict.com/
· http://www.translate.ru/rus/ (Really good for text translations)

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