English-German Dictionary

What dict.cc is all about

dict.cc is not only an online dictionary. It's an attempt to create a platform where users from all over the world can share their knowledge in the field of translations. Every visitor can suggest new translations and correct or confirm other users' suggestions. The challenging and most important part of the project is the so-called Contribute! system making this process possible.
To guarantee that the users' work is not lost in case something happens to the maintainer of dict.cc (Paul Hemetsberger), the resulting vocabulary database can be downloaded anytime.

Background, History & Motivation

After finishing school in 1997 I worked at a web development company in Munich (Germany) for half a year. Because I had to spend the following 12 months as a civil servant for the Republic of Austria and I didn't want to forget what I had learned I crafted my own personal website (which, by the way, was never published). My intention was not only to build a private site, but also to provide valuable content. So I came up with the idea of creating an online encyclopedia enabling everyone to read and write entries, trying to bring my experience with Internet Newsgroups to the web. Unfortunately my programming skills weren't developed far enough to implement this in 1998.
But the idea was born and it didn't vanish in the following years.

After civil service I worked as a web developer in several companies, aiming at collecting business experience, programming knowledge and savings to be able to become self-employed as soon as possible. Finally I ventured this step in February 2001.
When I was ready to put my "project knowhowbase.com" into practice, I wasn't sure if I could handle the additional work load while doing client projects. By accident I discovered a vocabulary database compiled by Frank Richter and so I had the idea of applying my concept to the field of translations. The basic vocabulary was already there and a little lookup routine was written easily. So I started dict.cc in late 2002.
Because I continually found ways to improve and extend the site (History) and dict.cc's users kept giving me great feedback and suggesting enhancements, I decided to postpone and possibly drop my plans regarding the "Knowhowbase". I guess the Wikipedia project already renders it useless by now.

That is why my current aim is to add all the requested features to dict.cc and to extend the vocabulary to every language pair for which people are willing to contribute translations. In addition to Spanish, French, Italian and so on I already found possible contributors for German-Chinese and several Indian languages. Wouldn't it be great to have dict.cc featuring hundreds of languages in a few years - from Arabic to Zulu?

Many thanks to

Frank Richter: The vocabulary of dict.cc is based on the word list he released at dict.tu-chemnitz.de.
Winfried Honig for allowing me to integrate Mr Honey's Business Dictionary into dict.cc.
Without having these lists as a foundation dict.cc wouldn't have been possible!

And most important: Many thanks to the users of dict.cc for supporting the project by giving e-mail feedback, linking to dict.cc, improving the vocabulary and answering translation related forum questions!

Contact Information

Please read the FAQ before contacting me!
To advertise on dict.cc please use Google AdWords.

Paul Hemetsberger IT-Dienstleistungen
Erdbergstraße 10/55, 1030 Wien, Austria
Phone: +43-699-19437670 (urgent cases only, otherwise mail)
VAT-ID: ATU60374017

paul@dict.cc

http://users.dict.cc/Paul
http://www.hemetsberger.com

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