WordPoint: A Pop-Up German-English Dictionary

WordPoint is a foreign-language pop-up dictionary for translating words as you read a document. It is a single-word translator designed to help you decipher a word by simply placing the cursor over it. You hear the word (English only) and see a pop-up box with a translation. So, just how well does WordPoint do that for German?

The WordPoint dictionary program is a single-word translator only. It does not translate phrases, sentences, or text blocks. Of course, if you've ever tried most translation software, you know this one-word-at-time approach actually offers certain advantages. In some ways, WordPoint is superior to regular translation software, but it does have its own unique quirks.

WordPoint is available as a low-cost download or on a mini-CD. The full version of the dictionary translates between English and the following 12 languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Slovanian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic. Only a few of the language sets offer interchangeable non-English translation (i.e., German-French or Spanish-German). A product of the Israeli software firm GalTech Soft Ltd., WordPoint claims a dictionary of about 500,000 terms per language, and since the program is a 41MB download (only minutes with a broadband connection), that's probably the case.

For this review, I tested the free 15-day trial download version of WordPoint on a computer running Windows 98. (WordPoint runs with almost any version of Windows, from 95 to XP. A separate Palm OS version is also available, but I did not test it.) For testing, I set the program to translate from German to English. The user can choose a default translation pair and switch easily between, say, German-to-English or English-to-German.

The download and installation went smoothly. Once you have WordPoint installed, it is always on, operating in the background. Any time you place your mouse cursor over a word in any application (email, browser, word processor, etc.) you will hear that word pronounced (sort of) and see a small pop-up box with one or more translations of that word. This can be a bit irritating if you don't really need it, but you can easily deactivate or activate WordPoint by clicking the lower menu bar icon. The program can also be set to react only when you click on a word rather than just move over it.

If WordPoint doesn't recognize a word, you see "No translation available" in the pop-up box, but you can add such terms to the dictionary. For most words, WordPoint provides a list of alternative meanings from which the user can choose the one that fits the context. I thought WordPoint did a fairly good job in this area, despite a few caveats I'll mention below.

Unfortunately, the audio component of this program works only with English. WordPoint is hopelessly tongue-tied when it comes to pronouncing German or most non-English words. Because the speech programming is based on English, even German words get treated as English, producing Aussprache results that would make any teacher of German shudder. So you can't use WordPoint to help you with your German pronunciation. Tut mir leid. (Sorry.)

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