ABBYY Lingvo.Pro

The portal beta has already been available (through invitations) for quite a long time, but I didn't have time to write about it. Actually there is not too much to write. At the moment it is a convenient place to search on-line dictionaries and parallel texts — at least for English-Russian language pair.

Basically what guys from ABBYY did was collect all popular concepts and needs and create a portal that would embrace and address them all. The idea is likely to turn successful, but the implementation also matters.

XBench adds spell-checking plug-in

A couple of weeks ago ApSIC released a new plug-in for their XBench. Based on HunSpell dictionaries, it checks spelling for a number of languages, including Russian. I briefly tested it and certainly found both advantages and drawbacks which I describe below.

Translating Idioms

It was just not long ago when I needed to translate quite an idiomatic text from Russian into English. My old friend Multitran is normally helpful in such cases, but it was nice to discover WikIdioms project. I learned about it from the recent issue of Multilingual magazine (fortunately or not, it was the most interesting post in this issue for me).

Can I Ever Note?

I was reading a blog post on a localization topic and was going to share some thoughts about it, but Evernote, the utility mentioned in the post, was so attractive that I first decided to check it out. By the way, I must admit that Russian localization of the site is pretty good. The only problem for me was that it is sort of haunting: I wanted the site to appear in English and I switched language wherever I could, but as soon as there was no choice it appeared in Russian again.

PROMTMan

He SUDDENLY appears next to you and quietly translates everything! ;) Try to recognize PROMT translation of popular songs!

This is about me.

ABBYY FotoTranslate

The application was recently mentioned somewhere in the news, and I really liked the idea to mix FineReader OCR system with Lingvo dictionaries and make it mobile, so that you can take pictures on our way and check what the words on the pictures mean. If you’re travelling and not speaking languages well enough, it may help you get your bearings in some situations. I recalled that a year ago I had to park a car in the streets of Vienna and as my German was quite poor I really could not understand what all different parking signs say. What I did was sending SMS with the sign text to a friend of mine who spoke German and she translated. What I did when I came back home was taking a course of German :)

Escape from salespeople

I’m not sure if I’m unique… I‘m even quite sure I belong to the majority. I don’t like salespeople. Sometimes I even hate them. My attitude towards them is (not surprisingly) directly proportional to their technical knowledge (or at least the visibility of that knowledge) and inversely proportional to their persistence.

Professionally, I often deal with people selling software, and I would place almost all of them into the following three categories: