First of all, I must start by saying that I am a freelance Spanish Translator, and I have to point out that no machine translation tool is as accurate as a human translation. This has been argued many times, and I have definitely noticed that over the years, many machine translation tools have improved greatly. However, a machine simply cannot read context, slang, local terminology and regional colloquialisms that a human translator who is a native speaker of at least the target language can.

Having said that, I can point out some very useful features of Babylon. I had heard of Babylon probably more than a year ago, when the site was being built, and translators across the internet were solicited to contribute. I visited the site, but, as I am naturally skeptical of machine translation tools, I did not download the software, until I read some reviews of it here on Epinions. Only then did I decide to give it a try. I downloaded it recently, and have used the program in working on one of my recent projects, translating religious commentaries from Spanish into English.

Babylon has hundreds of glossaries, broken down by category, that have, over time, been contributed by real live human translators. So, you might be able to translate a phrase that has one context in general educational texts, another context in sports and recreation, and still another context in a scientific or technical manuscript. You can choose the glossary based on what you are reading or writing. I was even able to find a few glossaries that are based on Christian terminology, which fit into the texts I was translating.

I admit, Babylon is easy to use. You do have to download additional glossaries to get the real benefit of it, but if you are connected to the internet, you can ask Babylon to search all its online glossaries if the term you are looking for cannot be found on the ones you already have downloaded. Just click on the word you want to translate (you can set your program to work on a shift + right mouse, middle mouse button, control+ mouse button, etc.), and a box will pop up that gives you a translation. If Babylon cannot find your word, it will give you options to search the internet. I found that this option generally brings you to the Encyclopedia Britannica online, and in some cases it helped, but not all.

Overall, Babylon is a useful tool. It definitely saves time when I have to look up a specific word, compared to my old method of searching my Spanish-English dictionary. However, I still find that it gets some words out of context, and can't find others. So, I was able to save time on about half of the words I didn't know right off the bat, and still had to look in my hard cover dictionary for the other half.

One small glitch I found with the program, which was quite simple to fix, is that it defaults to your right mouse button. This conflicts with the editing tools in my word processor, which uses this button to correct spelling, and some other functions. I have had to reset this feature to the middle button each time I restarted my computer, and can't seem to get it to stay where I want it.

Another great feature of Babylon that I have not had the opportunity to use is simply the number of languages available. You can find just about any language you're looking for here, while a lot of other tools are limited to several main languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, etc.). Babylon gives you just about everything.

So, for those of you looking to translate some terminology here and there, or reading web pages in a language you aren't completely fluent in, Babylon is great. But if you are looking for a complete and accurate translation of any kind of significant text, commercial or business web site, manuals, anything important, PLEASE......stick to us human translators!





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