No matter how skilled a translator could be, he/she can come across new vocabularies or idioms which are new to him/her. It might be a technical term, a folkloric expression which has no-equal in the target language, a brand name or just a new word!!
What do you do in such cases?!
I work on the English to Arabic pair and this is my methodology to deal with such cases.
I look it up in Golden Al-Wafi & Google translate dictionaries; this works only with non-technical single words that are unfamiliar to me.
But for most cases, I use Google definition to learn about new terms.
(For those who don't know what's Google definitions, just type "Define: X" in Google's search bar and replace X with anything and Google would bring up an ultra-summarized definitions of all the meanings X might refer to!)
And that's just one of the many reasons I love this job, because everyday I learn something amazing!!
What about you?!!
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Google Translate dictionaries, Golden Al-Wafi and Google "Define:X" are just great CAT tools, and I'd like to add some other tools in which I use sometimes when I come across some new terms for me, like: Urban Dictionary, and All language translator.
CAT : Computer Aided, or Assisted Translation.
Indeed, urban dictionary is a very useful resource to get an idea on the cultural scene behind a certain expression; thanks for bringing it up, Mohamed :)
Actually, the ways that I mentioned in my comment which help me to get a better translation are not quite defined as CAT tools, and that is only to be more precise, they are defined as online dictionaries.
The term "Cat tools" refers to a certain type of highly technical software which actually does the whole translation process! And the translator just do the proofreading!! Examples for this are SDL & Trados.
Apologies for the inaccurate information.
For more information about "CAT Tools": visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_tools
I hope you find it useful.
Thank you.