Lingoes translation tool

One more discussion of a software package...

A friend of mine in Taiwan recently introduced me to the free Lingoes translation software package. This package installs on Windows and does cursor translation, i.e. it provides a translation of whatever the cursor is pointing at, or selected text, in a pop-up window. So far it seems to work well in almost any application, though occasionally (rarely) it seems to result in Word or Wordpad crashing. Of course I use it for assistance when I am reading documents in Chinese. My reading vocabulary is sufficient that in a typical document I may be able to get 90%-95% of the characters, but of course every few lines there will be a character pair that I don't know, and all I have to do is highlight that character pair and a translation pops up. If I highlight an entire section of text, it sends it to Google Translate, and returns the results in a pop-up. This is turning out to be extremely useful because now I can actually sit down and read Chinese-language documents fairly painlessly. Before, reading for me was very stop-and-go because I had to pause every few lines to look up a pair of characters in a dictionary or by going to a web site. One of the pleasures of using this handy tool is that I actually learn new vocabulary, so for example yesterday I picked up a few things like 体现 (reflect)， 构成 (compose/make up), 输送 (transport), and 招收 （hire/recruit). In many cases I already knew the spoken words, but not the characters.

One of the neatest features is that you can download and install additional dictionaries for dozens of languages. As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of dictionaries that you can install. So far for Chinese to English, I have been very happy with the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary that I installed. Along with English translations, it includes the pinyin for the characters you look up, so you can learn the pronunciation in Chinese as well. Many of the other dictionaries I tried didn't include the pinyin for the Chinese. There are actually dozens of dictionaries, including many specialty dictionaries, some entirely in Chinese.

Overall, this seems like a pretty neat package. It claims that it is spyware and virus free. I can't assess that one way or the other, but so far Sophos AV and Windows Defender haven't reported any problems, and I have noticed any unusual performance issues with the computer.

I think the ideal application of this package is situations where you already know a language, but not perfectly, and like me you need an efficient way of looking up the occasional word or phrase while you're going through the document. This isn't really suitable for translating a large document in its entirety, there are probably better packages out there for that. And did I mention that it is free?