Top 5 Online Glossaries

A little bit of everything
1. Proz’s Glossary of English to Chinese Translations
http://www.proz.com/glossary-translations/english-to-chinese-glossaries

Call it the master of online Chinese glossaries, this categorised dictionary of user-contributed specialist terms is impressive both in scope and content. Although it suffers a little due to lack of cold hard content, it’s a very interesting site to look at if you’re just eager to your vocabulary in subjects which might not be talked at in length in mainstream dictionaries. It is also useful if you come across a word while translating which you just can’t seem to find the meaning for. Topics include anything from accounting to automotive, insurance to copyright and literature to telecommuncations.

Security & Finance
2. A Glossary of Securities and Financial Terms (hkex.com)
http://www.hkex.com.hk/glossary/glossary.htm

Provides both simplified and traditional Chinese glossaries related to security and finance terminology. Also allows you to choose between Chinese-English and English-Chinese versions, which would be very handy if you’re looking for the definition of a specific term. I imagine this would be an invaluable tool anyone wanting to get into finance, accounting or even just general business translating.

Information Technology & Computing
3. An English-Chinese Glossary of IT Terms (ogcio.gov.hk) / An English-Chinese IT Glossary (Koh Chit Tng) / An Intelligent Database for Standard Chinese Computer Terminology / English-Chinese Glossary of XML and SGML Terms
http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/eng/itaware/eglomenu.htm
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/%7Ecolips/archives/glossary/glossary.html
http://ccts.cs.cuhk.edu.hk
http://xml.ascc.net/en/utf-8/gloss.html

Between these four specialist glossaries you’re pretty much set to tackle any IT translation project that comes your way. While the first three are quite general and wide-spread in focus, the fourth one gives you a quite detailed overview of the different XML, Unicode and SGML terms.

Medical
4. Dr Dict / English-Chinese Medical Dictionary / AIDS Glossary
http://www.drdict.com
http://www.esaurus.org
http://casy.org/Glossary/glossary_main.htm

Need to find out the Chinese word for acholuric jaundice? Or how about the Chinese equivalent for the drug Aztreonam? Then look no further, for these three dictionaries should provide you with enough wordpower to decipher even the most complex medical document. Kudos to the AIDS Glossary in particular for providing such an important reference tool; and bad kudos to esaurus.org’s blocking of any kind of copying of the site. What’s the point, I wonder, of going through all the trouble to compile a Chinese medical dictionary if you won’t even let people copy from it?

Daoism
5. Glossary of Daoist Study Terms
http://www.esaurus.org

I myself haven’t studied Daoism a whole lot, but now I know there’s a site I can go to if I ever need to write an essay on him! The site includes both pinyin and Wade-Giles romanisations.

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