My tools
I use Trados, Word and Excel like most translators.
I also use IATE, the EU's terminology database.
It can be downloaded in several formats, including "tbx".
It is huge, at 750 MB, after unzipping.
This is what it looks like, using the copyright notice as the shell prompt:
For this download, I have selected the languages I need most frequently: da, de, en, fi, fr, it and, of course, sv.
The file needs to be transformed into segments that are small enough to open, and in a format that is easy to read.
I use C# with XmlReader to extract a number of files with exactly two languages, separated by an equal sign.
The screenshot below shows how I can look up the term "Solnhofer" that I needed.
Notice how it came back empty for "deen", "desv" and "deda".
Not until I tried "frde" did I get a hit I could use.
It turns out that "Solnhofer" refers to a type of rock found mostly in Germany and needed to exploit a printing technology invented in France.
Notice also how I don't need the entire term, only a few letters from it, such as "lnho":
This also gives me an easy way to deal with the uncertainty of one, two or one-and-a-half (i.e. hyphenated) word(s).
Just use the wildcard ".?" for zero to one missing characters.
This way I get all three of "timeout", "time out" and "time-out" with a single search:
Excel to Word and back
Sometimes I get an Excel file that has German in the first column and English in the second column with Swedish needed in the third column.
This is not an ideal setup so I wrote a C# program to convert Excel to Word and adjust the font size and color, like this:
Afterwards, I just transfer the Swedish lines back into the third column of the Excel file, using a similar C# program that goes the other way.