One technique I use to help me with translations is saving as many dictionary and glossary files as I can find in one place on my hard drive. I’ve managed to wrangle a good number of very specialized Japanese/English glossaries out of the dark corners of the Internet, since one never knows what’s going to be useful. While one can always browse what may be a relevent file, or load it up in Word or Firefox and use that programs built in search function, the best thing to do is really to use something like Google desktop search to search the entire folder for the desired keyword.
Sadly, Google Desktop Search hasn’t lived up to the promise so far. It’s been very useful for locating file (aside from a tendency not to erase the old record of files that have been erased/renamed/moved) but in contrast to the plethora of operators avaliable on their web site search, has until now lacked a convenient operator to restrict searching to a particular folder.
Thankfully, this has been addressed in the newest version. The updated feature list tells us how to do this.
“under:” search New!
The under: operator lets you restrict what folder your file search results can come from. For instance, if you search for [basketball under:”C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents”], your search results will only include files found in the “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents” folder.
ROCK ON. My next free weekend I am going to spend tweaking the hell out of that feature.