Linguatec Personal Translator 2008 review

Linguatec's Personal Translator 2008 Professional World Edition is the company's flagship translation software.

It can translate English into seven different languages and back again, as well as integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications such as Outlook, Word and PowerPoint.

You can access translation tools from within Microsoft Office or by using the standalone program. In Office applications you'll see a new menu that lets you quickly select the languages you want and translate sections or entire documents, presentations and emails.

The standalone program gives you access to Personal Translator's advanced features. Here, the simple layout means the source and destination languages you've selected appear in the top and bottom panes of the screen. Just type in or paste the text you want translated. Then choose to translate certain sections or the entire text.

The standard of translation into French and German was usually reasonable. Like most translation programs, it was accurate at translating text consisting of simple subject-verb-object sentences, but fell down with unusual word order or idiomatic expressions. It also made some odd mistakes, such as mixing up the French words for 'to' and 'from', completely changing the meaning of sentences.

The Professional version has a translation memory, which stores stock translations of certain phrases. You can add your own translations to the memory, but stock sentences cannot be adapted intelligently. So if the phrase "seven people were hurt" is stored and you type in "six people were hurt" it doesn't refer to the memory to help with the translation.

Personal Translator 2008 is an easy-to-use translation program, but it's expensive, and the standard of its translations is no better than Google's free online Translate software. You can buy cut-down single-language versions of Personal Translator for around £30, but Google's free service is still just as good.