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Babylon now is free

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Babylon now is free

Postby mmmmmm » Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:00 pm

NEWS

Presenting Babylon 10 – the most advanced translation system! Our high performance desktop translator boasts a host of new features, encased in a sleek new design. With Babylon 10, you'll enjoy all of your favorite traditional features, as well as document translation, complimentary fun facts, and more dictionaries & languages than ever before!

And the most amazing part yet? Babylon translation software is now FREE!


http://www.babylon.com/products/babylon/
http://www.babylon.com/affiliates/landing/index.php?id=CD1

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

But I think that Goldendict is the better
mmmmmm
 
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby Tvangeste » Mon Jan 21, 2013 3:25 pm

mmmmmm wrote:Babylon translation software is now FREE!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

But I think that Goldendict is the better


Heheh, Babylon is not even close! It looks ugly, the lookup times are very slow, even on very small amount of dictionaries, it also performs a lot of online searches which slows down the lookup further. I have no idea how they managed to sell any reasonable amount of copies of this stuff when alternatives such as GoldenDict are clearly superior and are free. :)

I tried practically everything that is available in the market, and so far the only other free app (besides GoldenDict, naturally) that impressed me was Lingoes. The guy who wrote it clearly knows its stuff and is pretty good at it. But besides the technical excellence, Lingoes has a fatal flaw, its ecosystem is more or less closed, there is no way to create and to add new dictionaries, it only supports its own (closed) format. And it seems that Lingoes is not in active development anymore.
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby mmmmmm » Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:31 pm

Tvangeste wrote: the lookup times are very slow, even on very small amount of dictionaries,

Yes, it is slow

Tvangeste wrote: I have no idea how they managed to sell any reasonable amount of copies of this stuff when alternatives such as GoldenDict are clearly superior and are free. :)

I think because Goldendict and other free app they make this free version

Tvangeste wrote:I tried practically everything that is available in the market, and so far the only other free app (besides GoldenDict, naturally) that impressed me was Lingoes..

What about Abbylingvo
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby chulai » Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:36 pm

Tvangeste wrote:Heheh, Babylon is not even close! It looks ugly, the lookup times are very slow, even on very small amount of dictionaries, it also performs a lot of online searches which slows down the lookup further. I have no idea how they managed to sell any reasonable amount of copies of this stuff when alternatives such as GoldenDict are clearly superior and are free. :)

I tried practically everything that is available in the market, and so far the only other free app (besides GoldenDict, naturally) that impressed me was Lingoes. The guy who wrote it clearly knows its stuff and is pretty good at it. But besides the technical excellence, Lingoes has a fatal flaw, its ecosystem is more or less closed, there is no way to create and to add new dictionaries, it only supports its own (closed) format. And it seems that Lingoes is not in active development anymore.


No, not even close. In my opinion, the reason for its popularity is that it was one of the first program of its kind and is more than 15-year old! Add to that that is was advertised well (something that has to improve in GoldenDict). It hasn't added any interesting feature in a looooong time, though.
Anyhow, there are some great features on it:
* currency, time and measure conversion tools.
* OCR support.
* activate Babylon window with keyboard AND mouse.
* one click to download free content from inside the program.

Lingoes has also some interesting features but I see it more as a Babylon clone with less content available and closed source too.

Overall the best option in my opinion is GoldenDict by far:
* Cross-platform.
* Multiple formats support.
* Online dictionaries (Although this need to be improved).
* Ton of features.
* Customizable look&feel with CSS styles.\
* Great performance with hundred of dictionaries.
* Open Source.
* Actively developed.
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby Tvangeste » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:02 pm

chulai wrote:Anyhow, there are some great features on it:
* currency, time and measure conversion tools.

Heheh, but why anyone would want this in a *dictionary* program? :) Most of the time the conversion is as easy as entering simple request to Google :)

Every time I see currency conversion tool or a fricking calculator in Lingoes, it make me laugh, since these tools seems sooo out of place.

chulai wrote:* activate Babylon window with keyboard AND mouse.

What do you mean?
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby Tvangeste » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:06 pm

mmmmmm wrote:What about Abbylingvo

Lingvo is a pretty good *commercial* product, they have both, the shell and the actual dictionaries, and for typical users the dictionaries are good enough. I've been using it for many years and bought 3 or 4 versions over the years. The problem is that there is not much change in either the shell or the dictionaries, with minor updates here and there and I don't feel like paying one more time to get about the same stuff I already bought. :)

Not to mention that Lingvo only supports its own format and I prefer a single shell that supports all my dictionaries in all the formats. You know, like GoldenDict ;)
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby mmmmmm » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:14 pm

In this version they improve and update the English-Arabic and Arabic-English
English-Arabic now has 163800 entries 394686 in total
previous version this dictionary has 51362 and 138880 in total
....
Arabic-English now has 77245 entries 848424 in total
previous version this dictionary has 67011 and 493275 in total
Words like these lathwork, fender bender, highfaluting I found them in new one

It is the biggest English-Arabic dictionary I ever saw .

and I took it to run in Goldendict
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby mmmmmm » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:20 pm

Tvangeste wrote:
mmmmmm wrote:Not to mention that Lingvo only supports its own format and I prefer a single shell that supports all my dictionaries in all the formats. You know, like GoldenDict ;)

Goldendict is the winner.
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby chulai » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:40 pm

Tvangeste wrote:
chulai wrote:Anyhow, there are some great features on it:
* currency, time and measure conversion tools.

Heheh, but why anyone would want this in a *dictionary* program? :) Most of the time the conversion is as easy as entering simple request to Google :)

Every time I see currency conversion tool or a fricking calculator in Lingoes, it make me laugh, since these tools seems sooo out of place.


I for one, see the convenience of having conversion tools in the same program and interface as a dictionary program. If I'm reading an American English text and see feet, inches and all that strange length I also like to use the same program I use to look up a word to convert foreign measures. The same if I'm traveling abroad. It could be implemented as a shell to an online service (Google or any other) and have a cached offline version.
It's not in my top list of features but It's a nice-to-have.

Tvangeste wrote:
chulai wrote:* activate Babylon window with keyboard AND mouse.

What do you mean?


I mean to be able to translate or invoke the program with a click of a mouse. When I used to use Babylon I would often open it with a Ctrl + Right click. Nowadays I achieve more or less the same result with GoldenDict + Autohotkey script. But Babylon allowed to invoke the program (with the mouse) with no need to select any text to translate. Similar to GoldenDict's Ctrl + F11 + F11.
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Re: Babylon now is free

Postby hanyl05 » Tue Jan 22, 2013 4:08 pm

very interesting discussion.
Several years ago I had a detailed discussion with lingoes author. The guy promised to release a tool for user to compile their own dictionaries, but until now still no results. On the contrary, lingoes is almost died in China, compared with that of mdict (Which is user-friendly on mobile platforms such as windows mobile, android and iphone).
The UI of lingoes is friendly and easy to use compared with stardict, which is a software developed by Huzheng when he was a third year student at Chinese Sichuan Univeristy. Huzheng is a Linux genius,and stardict is originally designed for linux platform. UI of stardict on windows platform looks ugly compared with lingoes and babylon, however, if you want to do some linguistic research by using dictionary, you will find the full-text function and the wild-card search function is quite impressive on stardict. I also had a detailed discussion with Huzheng and unfortunately, It seems that the author of stardict now become a buddhist and lost interest in program code and vocabulary.
Goldendict is really a very excellent software that can support a variety of formats. The following are my expectations for Goldendict:
>>Epwing format support (standard and common format in Japan, dictionaries in this format are usually perfect electronic publications by commercial press house)
>>mdx format support (Still active in China, although most of dictionaries with this format are converted from stardict and lingvo. anyhow, it is quite active)
>>full-txt search function, which will make goldendict far far better than lingvo and stardict;
>>wild card searchable function, which is obviously necessary.

I know very clearly that several functions in the above list is quite difficult to fulfill , and probably quite time-consuming to complete. Still we hope that dreams could become reality someday. Nothing is impossible when we think about the history of wikipedia.
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