North Americans are not generally noted as accomplished linguists. Our European friends put us to shame in that department. I read somewhere recently that the average business executive in the Netherlands speaks five languages. The London-based publisher of Fishing Boat World magazine, for which I am the eastern Canada a correspondent, is an Italian woman whose perfect OxBridge English diction puts my "Canajan" mid-Atlantic drawl to shame. She tells me that she's been studying English since she was 9, and then went on to earn a degree in foreign languages with English as her major.

I am always slightly embarrassed by the fact that my various European friends and business contacts are capable of speaking and corresponding with me fluently in English, but as a typical unilingual North American, I'm unable to reciprocate. Having lived in Canada all my life, I have a smattering of cereal box French, and I've studied just enough German to get me into trouble, but that's about it.

On-line language translation engines like Altavista's BabelFish, and Transparent Language, Inc's. Free Translation have made it possible to do a quick and dirty translations of non English material one finds on the Web or receives via e-mail. However, machine translation being necessarily an inexact science, it is helpful to have a backup translation dictionary, and what could be handier than having one right on your computer screen. While I generally dislike online help manuals written in prose, dictionaries are once sort of reference that work's better on a computer than in a book.

One such series of products is Ultra Lingua's bilingual translation dictionaries. Ultra Lingua is affiliated with McGraw-Hill, a leading American educational publisher.

Currently available in French-English (formerly Le Franglophile), Spanish-English and German-English (with more dictionaries to appear soon), these resources are lexically rich (over 250,000 indexed entries), including thousands of technical terms, idioms, slang words and phrases, proverbs, and indications of usage and grammatical peculiarities. They also include on-line references for language use and metric conversions, numbers, dates, and more. You can drag & drop words or phrases between Ultra Lingua and other D&D supporting Mac applications.

Ultra Lingua Software's president, Scott Carpenter, says that "The Spanish-English, French-English, and German-English dictionaries are extremely complete, professional grade dictionaries; they are easy to use and require relatively little disk space and RAM. In short, they are the perfect accessory for reading or writing in a foreign language."

Ultra Lingua dictionaries are designed to meet the need for a quick and complete reference of beginners and advanced writers alike.

These dictionaries may be downloaded for trial evaluation from Ultra Lingua's Website. The compressed files are about 2 MB. When you expand them and click the installer, it takes several minutes for the program to perform its initial indexing and sorting. Other than that, installation was familiar and straightforward.

Each expanded and indexed dictionary requires a little over 10 megabytes of free space, and runs in an 800K memory partition -- less if virtual memory or RAM Doubler are operating.

Ultra Lingua dictionaries can serve not only as a translation dictionaries, but also as bilingual thesauruses. By consulting the reverse translation of words or phrases in an entry' you can view synonyms for your original term.

To look up a word or phrase in the Ultra Lingua dictionary, just type or paste it into the entry (top) field of the user interface window.

In the middle translation field you will find translations for your entry. You can use the scroll bar to browse above and below your entry to see related information. Often several choices will be shown. To use the reverse translation field (bottom), click on a word in the translation box to translate it back into the language of departure: this is essential for making sure you have made the best choice to fit the appropriate context.

Other Ultra Lingua features:

• Option + selection or option+double-click in the reverse translation box will launch a new search on the selected word

• You can use drag and drop to and from other applications which support drag and drop. For instance' you can select a word from a word processor, drag it to Ultra Lingua with your cursor, and drop it on either of the language fields for translation. Special festures-- such as the interface language and operational parameters -- can be set within the Preferences item of the Edit menu.

• Change the size of the reverse translation box by dragging your curser on the expansion symbol located between the scroll bars.

Dictionary entries are arranged alphabetically' and you will often find sub-entries (expressions or phrases including the word you have entered) under a given heading. To help you navigate through the definitions, these sub-entries are printed in lighter type, with only the key word presented in boldface.

If you have the Mac OS PlainTalk extension installed, you can have your computer pronounce English entries for you in either the Spanish-English or German-English dictionaries by selecting words with your cursor and choosing "Read Selection" from the Sound menu (or by pressing Comma+H). The Spanish-English dictionary will read both English and Spanish, provided you have the appropriate extensions installed. Currently there is no speech synthesis modules available for German on the Macintosh. However Ultra Lingua says that several companies do have such projects in development.

The French dictionary's documentation makes no mention of speech synthesis, but it does include bilingual grammar tutorials that are not included in the Spanish and German versions.

The Ultra Lingua French-English version 2.2 dictionary adds the following features to previous versions:

• Thousands of new entries, including many technical terms and expressions.

• The addition of grammatical notes concerning irregular forms for thousands of entries (plurals, past participles, future stems, etc.).

• The marking of English and American usage and spelling.

The Ultra Lingua Spanish English Dictionary is currently in version 1.2

The Ultra Lingua German-English Dictionary is currently in version 1.1

The dictionaries' System requirements are modest.

Minimum configuration :
• 68020
• MacOS 7.1 and later (8, 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9...)

These dictionaries work well, and the only thing I found to complain about is that if you accidentally scroll away from the search result in the middle translation field, you can't snap back to it by double-clicking in the entry field. You must re-enter your search word or phrase from scratch.

Moore's Views & Reviews rating: 4 1/2 stars.

Ultra Lingua dictionaries cost $25.00 US per individual license. While the programs are downloadable over the Internet, you may purchase a copy on CD-ROM for $18 shipping and handling, in addition to the license fee.

For educational sales in North America and Australia, contact the McGraw-Hill companies higher education orders:
McGraw-Hill Companies
PO Box 182604
Columbus, OH 43272-303143004
Phone: 1-800-262-4729
Fax: 1-614-759-3644
E-mail: customer.service@mcgraw-hill.com

Ultra Lingua dictionaries are shareware, may be freely distributed under the following conditions:
-- ALL files (read-me, program, help, and registration) are distributed together (it is best to distribute the application in its installer);
-- NO registration codes may be distributed;
-- ANY distribution via CD-ROM or other media is first cleared through the publisher (at ulwin@ultralingua.com).

For more information, or to download, visit:
http://www.ultralingua.com/

You can contact Ultra Lingua by email at:
ulwin@ultralingua.com

Charles W. Moore

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Sunday, 12-Oct-2008 10:22:10 EDT