Grammars. I’ve used all of these:
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- J.D. Manton, Introduction to Theological German. It’s short and a little outdated in format, but for those that need a quick in and out, it is still useful, especially if you already have a background in other languages (esp. Greek).
- April Wilson, German Quickly. This is more robust and will guide you through the in’s and out’s of the language. It’s focus is German in general.
- Helmut Ziefle, Modern Theological German. This is half a graded reader and half a glossary of theological German. Great to pair with Manton and Wilson to practice the use of the language theologically.
- As an alternative to Wilson, check out this web-based open access German Grammar: A Foundation Course in Reading German, by Howard Martin, revised and expanded as an open online textbook by Alan Ng.
Dictionaries. The standard online German-English dictionary that we all use around here is Leo. It’s saved me tons of time; however, it is not always that good with theological terms. The other day I came across Dict.cc, and I’ve found it very helpful. It’s like a wiki-dictionary since users can contribute and vet new definitions. As such, its beginning to outpace Leo on vocabulary. In some circumstances, I’ve found it better for looking up phrases as well. In addition, it provides links to Google, Wikipedia, et al. if it doesn’t have an entry, from which I found several definitions.
Translators. In the past the best online translator I had found was FreeTranslation.com. I tried Google’s translator out recently, and it is significantly better than it was a year or two ago, though it still spits out ridiculous things sometimes. Online translators are not always helpful because they tend to struggle with the same constructions I do (e.g., lassen constructions).
Vocabulary. Here’s a link back to a German vocab list that I pulled together based on a few sources: German Vocabulary. One note though, after doing a bit of German over the past three years, I’ve decided that I would have spent less time on learning vocab once I got through the basics and would have spent more time just translating, mostly because you can end up learning a bunch of vocab that is irrelevant. Rather, I think it’s better to just translate and thus learn words that you’ll actually see.
I don’t spend as much time translating French, but I’ve found WordReference.com to be a handy French-English dictionary.
Do y’all have any other recommendations?
Dunelm Road 
Friday, 13 February 2009 at 8:47 am
I use Systran for translation. It’s not free, but it actually works quite well. If I have a German article I need to read, I scan it and make a PDF out of it, convert it to text through OmniPage, create a rough translation with Systran, and then I edit the translation by going through it with the original in hand. Saves tons of time if your German is not as good as it should be (which, I’m sad to say, is true in my case).
Friday, 13 February 2009 at 9:05 am
What are the prices like at Systran?
Friday, 13 February 2009 at 11:33 am
For Italian I’d recommend
http://www.garzantilinguistica.it/index.html
Friday, 13 February 2009 at 11:58 am
Thanks, Josh. That’s good to know. I’ve heard the rumor that the Vatican is pushing more patristic and biblical scholarship and so we should be seeing more Italian things.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 2:45 am
Ben–
This is rarely helpful, but worth noting as I reckon it could be helpful down the road as texts go increasingly digital:
For some theological constructions it’s possible to use German texts searchable on google books and English translations of the same. Search for the phrase in google and see if you can find a German text that has been translated into English, and see how the translator handles it…
Any thoughts on how much German one will usually have to interact with in a NT viva?
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 7:45 am
Thanks J.B. for that tip. I have had to resort to that a few times (using the links from Dict.cc), and with one or two of them I actually found something useful.
On the level of interaction, the rumor going around here is that about 10% of your bibliography should be foreign works.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 7:35 pm
Ben: Systran costs about £130, but there are different versions. See http://www.systran.co.uk/
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 7:37 pm
The price I quoted is for the “office translator”…
Monday, 23 February 2009 at 10:44 am
This sort of post is of wide usefulness.
I have Systran 3, and don’t find it as good as freetranslation.com for German. But possibly it has got better since.
I’ve been looking for a good Italian-to-English translator, so will try the suggestion above.
Only 10% foreign works in your biblio!?! The complaint I see all the time in reviews in the Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea is that anglophone scholarship is ignorant of important work in French. And, after all, machine translators for French->English work really rather well!
Monday, 23 February 2009 at 10:53 am
On the foreign works, I would say that the 10% corresponds more to NT than patristics. In the last 50 years or so English has dominated NT scholarship. However, patristics scholarship is more liguistically diverse, so I would say that the number would be much higher there. Yes, I would agree that with the relative ease of interacting with French, more should do it well.