Most translators are aware of the excellent Linguee website. While it’s limited in terms of the language combination it offers (Spanish-English, German-English, English-French, English-Portuguese, for some reason…), it does its job exceptionally well, in fact, it’s dictionary and translation memory all rolled into one. Or, as they call themselves, a Dictionary and Translation Search engine.
Of course, as translators, what we really want is for terminology lookup to be as fast and efficient as possible, and therefore, a variety of tools are available for one-click terminology research, like IntelliWebSearch, a tool which brands itself as “the ultimate terminology research experience”, but is brought down by its horrific interface (and website).
The good people behind Linguee are going the same route, and have released a beta version of their desktop software, which as far as I understand will soon be available to professional translators on a subscription basis. (That’s right, not free.) I was lucky enough to find an invite to their beta program in my inbox the other day, just as I was working on a particularly tough project with loads of technical terminology, giving me the perfect chance to test its real-world credentials.
What Linguee Professional does is very simple. Anywhere you are, just click into a word of phrase and the program will look it up in the huge Linguee database. Nothing wrong there. The result is presented in a nice little speech bubble above the text (and it works in SDL Trados Studio, too!). However, while the idea is good, the implementation, so far, is not. It has one or two additional benefits compared to just using the website. For example, there is need to mark the whole word, just click into it. When two words which stand next to each other are recognised, the corresponding result is shown instead of the single-word translation. So if you clicked into the word “table”, and the following word were “tennis”, Linguee Professional would be clever enough to understand that you were looking for the term “table tennis” and look that up for you.
One-click lookup in MS Word with a nice looking speech bubble.
However, at least at this early beta stage, there are a number of shortcomings/bugs which still need to be ironed out in order for this to be ready for prime time:
- The website sometimes fails to load, even if you have a working internet connection.
- While single-click lookup is great, it is not possible to mark two or more words for more precise term lookup, meaning that Linguee Professional tries to second-guess you too often.
- The default keyboard shortcut is control+left mouse-click. Now try and select more than one file to attach to an email and you’ll see that it’s just replaced one of the most commonly used shortcut in Windows. While you can still change this in the settings, this is a terrible oversight on behalf of the programmers.
- If you use a dial-up or USB modem, and your connection is not active at start-up, Linguee Professional will actually show an error message warning you that it has failed to connect to its server. A bit aggressive, I would think. I mean, give us a second to log onto that internet connection, okay?
Linguee Professional starts at five euros per month if you pay for a yearly subscription (and that’s for the slimmed-down “Premium” version). As things stand today, it is not worth the money for something that is basically just a wrapper for their (freely accessible) website, just like the worst mobile apps that are produced by the bucket load today. The bottom line: If you bring it to the desktop, give it some desktop features, otherwise the only thing we are doing here is pay a monthly fee to access a free website.
Let’s be careful here because this is not the finished version yet but in terms of a beta review, I would have to say that this is not good enough.
You can give the Linguee Professional beta a spin here. Take it for a test drive and let us hear your opinion in the comments.
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