REVIEW: Linguatec Personal Translator 2008 Professional Edition

Translates and speaks in seven languages

Personal Translator enables users to translate text into and from seven different languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portugese and Chinese) using a dictionary with over 3.8 million words, it will automatically correct typos and misspellings, and it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat.

While there are many free translators, nothing quite matches the functionality of a purpose-built package. Linguatec uses UK English, not US, there is the ability to add to and customise the dictionary to a user’s own business needs, plus it indexes all past translations, so the longer the system is used the quicker the translations become as it can grab and use regular expressions from memory rather than translate from first principals.

The software is simple to use, users either paste text into the top panel and then select the part of the text they want to translate, or select a whole document such as a Word file or a PDF and import that into Personal Translator. It seemed to work fine, although it did make some howlers on some French to English documents.
A nice feature of the translator was the text-to-speech facility that reads either the translated or the source text via an avatar in the bottom of the screen. The quality of the speech was exceptional and could be used to produce podcasts in different languages.

Although it is comprehensive and there is a lot of functionality it still has problems with the translation, and sites such as Google are as good if not better.

Distributors: Interactive Ideas