What are they and what are they for?
Bilingual Search Engines are web pages design for its user to search for something in different languages at the same time, allowing him to obtain detailed information in those languages simultaneously. Here we can find a parallel corpus between two searches of the same term (of a language) in two different languages. This is real-time information and it is updated at the same rate as search engines like Google and Bing. Using these search engines gives its user much more new information when making an inquiry by literally translation the term from its source language to the target language of your choosing, since we cannot, usually, get all the information we want in a single language.
How do they work?
This search engine, 2lingual, is the only one that is online and available for consult, although there have been others. However, it is a very good example since every almost bilingual search engine there ever was followed this format. You insert the term (in your preferred source language) in the search bar then, underneath, there are two boxes where you can choose your source and target languages from an extensive list of 37 languages. Then you just click ‘search’!
Following these steps displays a parallel corpus where the most relevant and important results, pertaining the term searched for (in both selected languages), are presented exactly how they would have been if we were navigating the official google pages of those languages.
But there is more! There is another way to use this search engine. Let’s look at the image below.
If we wish to do so, we can turn off the automatic query translation, which means the search engine will look up the term in its original language, but the results shown will be the ones of the target language official google page. The outcome is the same: a parallel corpus which shows the most relevant and important results.