Babylon 7 review

Babylon is an online dictionary and translation program.

It provides translation in 75 languages, currency and measurement conversions and access to published dictionaries and public glossaries such as Wikipedia. It can auto-complete words and check spelling in email, instant messaging and blogs.

Translation and dictionary services are freely available online, but Babylon can give you all this information, particularly linguistic translation, without you having to leave the application you're using. Just highlight text in any application, hold down the Ctrl key and then right-click for a translation to or from English.

This reveals a small, non-intrusive popup window, along with dictionary definitions from each of the dictionaries you have installed. Many are free, but premium content, such as the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, costs extra. You can change the colour and font in this window, but the translation section is often hard to find.

However, a far worse failing is the awful quality of Babylon's translation. In our tests, it translated text from a Spanish review of a USB flash drive as "owing to its dimensions it is difficult opening for connecting to the team". Google's free translator, meanwhile, interpreted the context and translated the text correctly.

Even more worrying is the Smart Dictionary, which enables translation between two languages that don't share a direct dictionary. It does this by translating into English and then into the desired final language. However, any poor translation into English from the source language is going to have an effect on the final language. If you need a reliable translation, you won't want to risk a Chinese whispers-style result.

We were also constantly nagged by adverts to buy premium content. Babylon might be more convenient and include more features than free online translators such as www.freetranslation.com, Babelfish or Google, but its results are no more reliable, and in some cases they are simply wrong. Based on these findings, Babylon 7 is one to avoid.