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Today’s society is definitely taking on more of a polyglot look. As national boundaries are relaxed and immigration, whether legal or not, increases, we need to be able to communicate in languages other than our mother tongue. Translation Plus is a product that offers to help when the communication involves converting a document from one language to another.

Developed by VIP S.r.L. and published in the UK by Phoenix Global Software, Translation Plus can translate documents into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese in its guise as “your personal document translator”. Installation is reasonably straightforward although at one point I thought the process has stalled. However after a short wait, it kicked back into life and completed the task.

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Translation Plus consists of two separate modules, each having its own entry in the Start menu. The main module is a text editor which provides the translation capability. You can type directly into the text editor or bring in an existing file. While Translation Plus supports a number of popular file formats, including Word, RTF and HTML, it insists on defaulting to its own proprietary format when listing files to be opened. This is an annoyance that really needs to be fixed in a future version of the software. As you would expect, basic editing and formatting can be carried out but, sadly, there is no spell check facility.

With the relevant text in place, it is time to select the appropriate translation option. Although Translation Plus supports the six languages mentioned earlier, not all the possible combinations of source and destination languages are available. While English is well supported in that you can convert to and from all the languages, others are not so fortunate. There is no German/Spanish translation option and Portuguese can only connect to English for translation in either direction.

The various translation options are available from a drop down pick list. There are a number of specialist dictionary that can be used but these do not support all the languages. As a test I used the same document for translation from English to each of the languages and then back again. I then compared the results of the double conversion to the original document.

The translation process is reasonably quick, with any graphics encountered being ignored, but the results do show the limitations of this automated task. The software is accurate enough when it comes to a word for word conversion but it struggles with grammar and syntax. The initial results might pass muster with somebody not totally familiar with the language but a native speaker would easily spot the mistakes.

As part of the translation process, the software saves a copy of the original and translated document as an RTF file. Unfortunately these two files will be over-written when the next document is processed as the same file name is used in each case. No reminder is given to save converted documents in their own right. This is another area that needs to be looked out.

The second module is an editor for adding words to an existing dictionary or creating a new one. As well as entering new words in the source and destination language, you can also designate the part of speech for individual words.

Translation Plus will run on Windows 98 or later with 32MB of RAM and 70MB of hard disk space. Pricing is in the region of £45. While not producing a perfect translation, the software does creating a working copy that would benefit from a degree of editing and some fine tuning from somebody with a reasonable grasp of the chosen language.

http://www.phoenixglobalsoftware.co.uk/axelab/translation_plus/index.asp