Language Translator

Translate between seven different languages when on the move

Thursday, September 12, 2002

If your company executives face problems interacting with foreign clients due to a language barrier, then here’s something that might make things easier. The L&H Power Translator, as the name suggests, can translate between seven different foreign languages, namely English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese. It can be useful to have it installed on your notebook when traveling. 

There are no issues with the software’s installation, and it works on all versions of Windows. We tested it on Win 98. You also need a sound card and speakers for text to speech translations. Using the software is quite easy. You can create a new project and type your text to be translated directly into L&H Power Translator Pro. It can work with HTM, HTML, RTF, and TXT file formats. The software can also be added to MS Word, Excel, and Outlook to do direct translations of your documents and e-mails. It appears as a translate menu item in applications’ toolbar. There’s a dictionary to which you can add your own new words for better translations. Other features in the product include word lookup, inflections etc. 

We tried several things to test the software. First we translated simple text documents, and it did fine with those. We then took text from various French and Spanish newspapers on the Net and translated it to English. Here, the translations weren’t completely accurate, and in fact some sentences were very difficult to understand. In others, it wasn’t able to translate certain words. Here, you may have to customize the dictionary to get better results. Another small problem we faced with the software was that it doesn’t preserve attributes like italics and bold after the translation.

The Bottom Line: We compared the translations of this software with those from a free online translation software called Babelfish. The online software gave similar results as this one. So, if you’re mainly looking for translating documents from the Internet, this may not be a good choice, since there’s something similar available for free. However, it could be a good option for frequent travelers. The software comes with a detailed manual and online help is provided from Australia, Europe, Latin

America and USA. Rashmi Sahu at PCQ Labs

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