English Gaelic Dictionary
One popular item online is dictionaries. These take many forms. One of the most populate is for translation such as an English Gaelic dictionary. These are more like translators than dictionaries.
In the old days in language if someone wanted an English Gaelic dictionary they would have a book. They could look up words and phrases in the book for on the spot translations. For example if they wanted to find a bus they look up the phrase where's the bus. Sometimes people would look up things the wrong way and come up with word that really didn't make sense in the context they were spoken.
But now thanks to the Internet something like an English Gaelic dictionary is more of a translation program. It allows people to enter in phrases, words, or even a whole block of text. Then it returns the same text translated into another language. This can even be done for Web addresses. An entire website can be translated this way.
When looking for an English Gaelic dictionary one of the earliest sources online was the Babelfish. It was a website eventually purchased by AltaVista. It became AltaVista translation. It was quite popular. That's because it was a pretty new idea. Many people translated for chat, and their websites. But sometimes the translations didn't make much sense.
Something that many people thought about doing for something like an English Gaelic dictionary was to translate from one language to another and then translate back to see if it still makes sense. Many times the final result of this process was quite different from the starting point. For example translating the phrase "I want a cake" from language A to language B and then back to language A might result in something like "a cake is mine."This was a good way to come up with alternate versions of a sentence or paragraph, but it proved the translation wasn't really up to par.
Recently Google has come up with a translation service that includes an English Gaelic dictionary. Google's service is superior to the old one. That test of translating from one language to another and then back generally produces exactly the same text as the starting text. Now people can't perform rewrites of sentences and paragraphs. But they may be receiving better translations.
In ancient times there were scholars would perform translations. Forget about anything like an English Gaelic dictionary. But now the Internet provides amazing services.