Babylon Pro 5.0

 

Some products don't give you a massive interface with 17,000 options hidden in a plethora of menus, submenus and dialogue boxes that you'd be lucky to find even after having thoroughly read the PDF manual that took the felling of an entire rainforest to print out, backed by several months browsing and experimentation. What's more, you'll be stunned to hear, they're all the better for it. Add flexibility, good usability and very competitive pricing to the mix, and you've got yourself a bargain. Or rather, in this case, a Babylon.

 

The prospect of testing Babylon Pro 5.0, to give it its full title, did not I have to confess initially fill me with enthusiasm. I've come across more than my fair share of multilingual dictionary programs that could not even charitably be described as falling into the "waste of time" category. Installing Babylon brought no surprises, being an entirely software-based product, with no box, printed manual or even a CD. You do everything online, selecting any of the language combinations and directions available between English and 13 other languages, downloading the individual dictionaries and the actual Babylon program itself to get up and running. The installation procedure and instructions are all clear and unlikely to cause any problems. You also have the option of downloading a large number of specialist glossaries that other users have made available online. All these dictionaries and glossaries can be installed by simply double-clicking them in their download directory/folder using Windows Explorer (yes, it's another Windows-only product, although it will run on every version of the operating system from Windows 98 Second Edition to Windows XP). In practice, there are no disadvantages to Babylon's software-only based approach, which undoubtedly helps to keep the total cost of the product down, although you'll need a broadband connection to do all this unless you have the patience of a saint, since you'll find yourself downloading more than 20MB before you get up and running.

 

So, what do you get once all that is over and done with? Well, the answer is a window that appears whenever you select a word and press a user-configurable combination of keystrokes and/or mouse clicks. That window displays every "hit" that you get in any of the dictionaries and glossaries installed for the word or phrase selected. Take a look at the screenshot alongside and you'll see. The first thing to note is that although Babylon's language combinations tend to be between English and another language, you can type in that the result from a given "into-English" hit to then carry out another search in order to work between the non-English languages. This obviously isn't ideal, but it is nevertheless there as a workaround which can be useful if you're working away from home with your laptop, for example, and don't have a decent basic online dictionary for that language combination. Secondly, you can see that Babylon carries out what our friends in the translation memory industry would call fuzzy searches, meaning you can just select a word or phrase and simply let Babylon get on with it, without having to, for example, manually enter the infinitive of a given word. Thirdly, Babylon also provides synonyms and definitions for any English terms found, something that's very useful for those working out of English. This function also provides useful support for non-native English speakers writing in English. Fourthly, with just one click you can also search the Web for your term using the search engine of your choice, a very handy research feature. Lastly, you can copy any of the text displayed in the window by simply selecting it and using the usual keystroke combinations or right mouse button context menu options. These features mean that Babylon is very easy and quick to use, especially if you regularly overwrite the source language or use translation memory. Babylon integrates perfectly with all the main translation memory and/or speech recognition programs.

 

But, let's face it, what really interests us about an online dictionary is not how it works, but the quality of its entries. Well, the first thing to get into perspective is that Babylon's dictionaries, while offering a broad spread of specialist terminology, don't claim to offer true specialist support and can't compete with any of the big, established specialist dictionaries out there. That said, they're really not that bad at all and in some areas, such as medical, surprisingly good for a general dictionary. Other areas, such as legal and financial, are less well served. But - and I've been keeping you waiting for the good news - for just £31.30 plus VAT, for which you can merrily download all the dictionaries and glossaries available (over 1,600 covering 70 languages and 15 categories), Babylon can't be regarded as anything other than extraordinarily good value for money.

 

But there is even better news, you can also buy a range of titles for use in the Babylon Pro platform by established market leaders Genius (Japanese), Langenscheidt (German), Michaelis (Portuguese) and Signum (Spanish thesaurus), all available from the Babylon website (www.babylon.com). Not only that, but Babylon also comes with a very cute little conversion facility for measurements, times (so you don't get your colleagues out of bed!) and currencies (very handy for job quotes), automatically updating the latter whenever you are online. None of these features would add up to a "must buy" product on their own, but they're certainly very nice bonuses, which I have been making merry use of ever since I started using the program.

 

Having gushed on for a full five paragraphs, however, I'm afraid there are inevitably also some flies in the ointment. Firstly, you can't create your own glossaries exclusively for your own use unless you buy the very much more expensive Corporate version of Babylon (upwards of £1000 for a complete solution), which can also be networked amongst other things and has clearly been designed for deployment by large companies. It is true that you can build glossaries of your own, but before you can use them they have to be sent to the Babylon website, where they are made freely available to everyone, which could well be something you're not too keen on (to say the last) if they benefit from considerable specialist knowledge or contain information your clients would consider confidential. On the other hand, that's how many of the currently available glossaries got there, something that also has its down side. Although they have all been vetted and rated, some of them inevitably contain less than useful entries, such as the exquisite "candle cap" (instead of "spark plug cap") in the Italian automotive glossary. In short, it's a shame that a facility for editing and adding entries is not available since that would make this an even more attractive product. You can, however, advise the creator of a particular glossary that it needs to be corrected, a feature that could perhaps be built on in the future. A further weakness is that Babylon doesn't distinguish between American and British English and mixes the two, with a general bias towards the former although certain entries do clarify usage (e.g. nappy = diaper).

 

All in all, then, although there's certainly room for improvement, Babylon is unquestionably a valid product, providing a good first level of consultation across a range of languages while providing helpful additional features for a very attractive price. It's a particularly good solution for those using translation memory, since I quite happily managed to get it working properly with all the various systems on my PC, where it can be used to relatively painlessly help swell the number of entries in your terminology databases while being unobtrusive when not required. Highly experienced translators may not consider it useful, but almost everyone else whose language combinations are covered directly is likely to find it a helpful purchase, especially if those languages are not well served by online dictionaries in general.

 

Babylon is available from UK translation tool specialists Omega First (www.omegafirst.co.uk) or the Babylon website (www.babylon.com). Omega First are currently offering a special discount.

First published in ITI Bulletin, 2004.