ABBYY Lingvo vs Multitran: crowdsourcing in dictionaries

Just another subjective opinion :)

I've always liked Lingvo. I'v been using this dictionary for ages, I like people at ABBYY, and Tatyana Danielyan, their Director of Project Management, was so kind to award me with the full version of their dictionary a year or more ago, and it was extremely helpful in my trips to non-English-speaking countries etc.

And I was occasionally using Multitran. As we still experience some network slowdowns, it was inconvenient to look up words on the Web; it took much longer than searching Lingvo.

However, this weekend I was translating a text from a completely new domain for me. Therefore, I had to check each and every term against a dictionary, and to make sure this is the term that is actually used in Russian. All of a sudden, I discovered that Multitran is much more useful from this point of view.

Multitran became interactive many years ago. Registered users may add their terms to it and expand to different domains, and due to this crowdsourcing it's really much more "live" and "up-to-date" than Lingvo is. Additionally, their style to present information proved to be more convenient for me, and because of that, even in times of network slowdown it took me less time to come up with a correct term in Multitran than in local Lingvo dictionary.

Both dictionaries lack Swedish, though, which I personally would like to have.