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.
So, currently it is an on-line interface to the engine that allows you to search ABBYY Lingvo dictionaries, phrases and translation memories that ABBYY created from publicly available parallel texts. For English-Russian pair, there are about 5 million words in the memories which mean you can see a lot of use cases for your word or phrase. I've always wished to do concordance search without opening Trados and loading memories — and my wish came true. Moreover, users can upload their own translation memories (deciding if they want to use them privately or share with other users) and search them as well.
ABBYY also promised to add some "artificial intelligence" to let it combine different existing translation memory units into a translation that never existed in the memory. The idea is not new, but to my knowledge it is still not as widespread as the concept of fuzzy matching, for instance. However, I believe in ABBYY and hope their implementation of this functionality will be effective and useful. Eager to see it.
The portal also lets you add your translation of words and phrases to the dictionaries — something that we love about Multitran, something that makes any portal live and dynamic and thus more efficient. The question here is if ABBYY is going to check what users enter or not and which dictionaries such input will go to. At the moment, what I add goes directly to the dictionaries, and the portal provides my e-mail address as a reference with the entry (not sure if it shows my e-mail to all the users, but if yes, I definitely don't like it).
Another nice little thing our translators loved is that Wikipedia page for the search term is just one click away from the portal, so you can quickly get an idea of what it is if no translation is found.
As we touched Multitran a few lines above, I must admit I like its interface more. It's very basic and text-based; however, when you work with dictionaries you hardly need graphics. At least this is true for me. All you need is fast response and the more results fit the screen the better, preferably no additional mouse clicks. Unfortunately for me, this is different with Lingvo.Pro. Although they have just a few graphics, loading time compared to Multitran is longer, there is less text in the screen and more clicks are needed to see everything you want. And what I personally hate about Lingvo.Pro is losing the focus. When I work and return to Multitran window by Alt-Tab or by a mouse click, the focus is normally in the field where I enter my words. With Lingvo.Pro, I always need to first click in the text box (and manually delete what is already there from my previous searches). Please, guys, do something about it, it will speed up my work at least twice, I think! And waiting for more exciting features!
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