For a technical translator, specialist dictionaries are like old friends. Just as a racing driver wears out cars, so translators wear out dictionaries. And one of my own personal favourites finally fell to pieces the other week, so I had to buy a new version. Of course, the good side to this is that I have ended up with a newer, updated edition.

It also fascinates me how dictionaries change over time. And of course, how people change over time. This particular dictionary, the "Dictionary of Electrical Engineering, Power Engineering and Automation" is actually published by Siemens - or rather, by Siemens A&D Translation Services. It remains one of the best dictionaries in its field, so a special thank you to Siemens. As a technical translation company that does a lot of translation work in the control systems and industrial automation sectors, the team at SalfTrans greatly value this specialist technical dictionary.

This reminds me that I must also update my old German / English edition of the Brinkmann / Schmidt dictionary (or, to use its proper name, the "Wörterbuch der Daten- und Kommunikationstechnik"). The first edition that I used, back in the early 1980's when I was working as a staff translator in Berlin, featured splendid photographs of the two authors, one of them wearing a particularly 1970's jacket and glasses, complete with cigarette in hand. By the next edition of the dictionary in the late 1980's they both looked far more sober. Then Mr Schmidt, disappeared from the credits, and now Karl-Heinz Brinkmann is joined by Herbert Blaha as authors of the most recent 2002 edition.