If you are a professional translator or work with languages in another capacity, then you might as well use dictionaries almost every day. Dictionaries are not only reference aids but also tools of work in the linguists’ hands.
With the rise of computers and the Internet, the hard-copy reference materials are gradually being replaced by electronic counterparts or even more enhanced versions of the old books. Thus the translator’s efforts to look up words and terms in several volumes of different dictionaries are spared and shifted to a single point of reference.
One of the most popular dictionary tools currently available is Babylon (http://www.babylon.com/). This is not a dictionary proper but an environment for working with some of the leading dictionary products on the market today.
Besides its dictionary features, Babylon also provides currency and measurement conversions, machine translation engine, and a spell-checker for emails, instant messaging and blogs. These functionalities, however, won’t be the subject of this post.
SEARCH WITHOUT TYPING
The most unique feature which makes Babylon stand out amongst the crowd of computer dictionaries is its OCR technology. This means that when you read a document or surf the web, or just see any text on the PC screen, you can simply click your mouse button over a word which you want to check and the Babylon window pops up and initiates a look-up in the configured bunch of dictionaries. You don’t need to type anything – the application recognizes the respective word and types it for you in the search field. (Of course, you can type the words/phrases by yourself, like in a conventional dictionary application.)
The developers went a step further by extending the search functionality, enabling Babylon to automatically include the surrounding words in the search query. To illustrate this, please have a look at the picture below:
In the text I’m reading there is a phrase “feasible target payout ratios” which I want to look up. Hovering over the word “ratio”, I click the mouse scroll button (This is my personal setup; other users may set it up differently). Babylon starts searching a definition for the word “ratio” but finds that its dictionary databases contain definitions not only for “ratio” but also for “payout ratio”, and even for “feasible target payout ratios”. The software proposes the respective results from any lexical databases where it appears.
What I found here very convenient is Babylon’s feature of searching and suggesting terms present not only in the dictionaries I have already configured to use but also in the dictionaries available in the large online database offered on Babylon’s website. So, if I’m satisfied with the definition of the term in a particular dictionary, I can easily add it to my bookshelf for further searches by simply clicking on the “+” (plus) sign in the dictionary title bar. In this way, your stock of working dictionaries gradually enlarges, thus ensuring better hits in future searches.
PREMIUM CONTENT
Another great asset offered by Babylon Ltd is its stock of premium dictionaries. If you go to http://www.babylon.com/ and then to the menu Add Dictionary > Premium Content, you are offered dictionaries issued by renown publishing houses (Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Britannica, Larousse, PONS, Langenscheidt, to mention few of them). However, their content here is provided not as hard copy but in an electronic form, enabled to be installed in and searched by the Babylon dictionary application. I have noticed that the company continually expands this list, including more and more dictionaries. These dictionaries cover some of the most popular languages used on the Internet – English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, etc.
DICTIONARIES BY BABYLON LTD.
Apart from the so-called “Premium” dictionaries, Babylon Ltd. also offers a multitude of free online dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopedias, and other reference databases. These are neatly categorized by topics. If we stick to linguistic content, we will be happy to find out that Babylon offers its own proprietary dictionaries covering a wider range of language pairs (go to http://www.babylon.com/gloss/glossaries.php, then Languages category, Babylon sub-category): from English to Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and vice versa. These are very comprehensive dictionaries (for example the English-English pair containing the total of 161,892 entries) which use a morphology search engine that can recognize words in their different grammatical or spelling forms. They are offered free of charge to users who buy the Babylon application.
USER DICTIONARIES
The third type of content that can be used with Babylon is the dictionaries created by users. They can be found at the Categories web page (http://www.babylon.com/gloss/glossaries.php).
In fact, one can easily compile their own glossaries to be loaded and used in Babylon side by side with the renowned Premium dictionaries. This can be done with the help of a separate application (provided free of charge by Babylon Ltd.) – Babylon Glossary Builder (version 3.1.0). The lexical data must be prepared beforehand in an Excel spreadsheet and then imported and converted to a .bdc file format. The downside of this additional tool is that it is not very straightforward and must be tweaked to get the desired results. The previous version of this application (namely Babylon Builder v. 2.2) was much more in line with Babylon’s strengths – namely, ease of use and intuitive functionalities.
From the perspective of language professionals, the possibility to create user (or any custom) dictionaries is one of the major strengths of the Babylon application in general. Premium content mostly supplies generalist dictionaries. What a professional translator needs in his/her daily work is narrowly specialized content – e.g. glossary of electrical engineering, bilingual automotive dictionary, and the like. Because such products have not been provided by Babylon Ltd. yet, the professional user can rely on the community efforts and sharing initiatives.
While browsing through the list of categories, I noticed that most of the user dictionaries were created 5–6 years ago and very few are added recently. I don’t know what the reason for this drop is, but Babylon Ltd. must definitely do something to urge the users create and upload their content in order to sustain the interest not only of users with small to medium linguistic needs but also of professional translators.
What I would like to see in the future versions of the dictionary application is a better control of the search options – e.g. implementation of wildcard searches and better ways to restrict language pairs in a particular search query. The feature I’m missing the most is, let’s call it, enhanced “fuzzy searching”. In other words, when I activate the appropriate option the dictionary will give me all headwords that contain the word searched. This means that when I look up for “tax”, I’ll be provided with the definitions of the terms “corporate tax”, “tax advisor”, “tax return”, “capital gains tax”, etc. (i.e. the word “tax” appearing in combinations with other words in the entries). This feature is very useful in the translation work because oftentimes a term has an identical or similar meaning as used in another phrase. The translator is thus given additional information how the term is employed in other combinations.
Judging from my experience as translator, Babylon dictionary has the most user-friendly interface and maybe the richest lexical content gathered in a single application I have ever seen. I believe that it can meet the needs not only of a general computer user but also of professional translators and linguists. The great stock of quality dictionaries and the option to create your own (user) glossaries makes this application a powerful and highly customizable tool that is worth to be considered when selecting a computer dictionary.
