Dictionary .NET

Why settling for one translation when you can get three and then pick the one that sounds best to you.

And “sounds” couldn’t be a most appropriate term in this context, as Dictionary .NET not only offers you simultaneous Google, Bing, and Yandex translations into nearly 100 languages but will also let you listen to the original and translated texts using TTS technology.

Surely, this small utility won’t win a prize for excellence in interface design, but it will solve your all your translation doubts in seconds in a compact GUI that requires no installation and takes up very few system resources. The background image that appears on the program’s one-window interface is, to say the least, distracting, and it may make reading the results a bit hard sometimes despite the bold colorful characters used.

This does not detract from the program’s true beauty – the possibility of having three translations for the price of one in just seconds. Yes, they are automatic translations powered by the Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, and Yandex.Translate online services, but in many instances, that is all you’ll ever need. It can translate words, sentences or full texts (subject to the limitations of each of these services), and you can edit the original text using your keyboard or Google’s virtual keyboard and request a new translation as many times as needed. If the original text is just a word, you’ll be presented not only with its equivalent in the language selected but also with synonyms, the word’s grammatical category, etc.

The program also offers you the opportunity to listen to the original and translated texts in the source and target languages, respectively. Note that you will need to have installed on your computer the corresponding TTS engines for both languages – otherwise, the texts will be read with a funny accent, that of the default TTS.

Dictionary .NET does not offer any new translation service – it is but a search aggregator that compiles the translations provided by the three leading online services, but it does it well and (in many cases) in less than a second.