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	Festivale online magazine Technology Bytes technology section Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf review

Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf

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The Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf is a multi-lingual dictionary that by default provides the translation of words on-the-fly while you are using the browser. Although the product pops-up when the browser starts, it can be used at any time to search for words in any of the four languages.

iFinger's Pop-up translator. Purchase and download other Oxford titles to create reference library. Installs onto the PC. Hold the cursor over a word on a web page and the translation is displayed in a pop-up window, where more than one language could be possible, tabs will appear.

See also: Feature on Learning Languages

Scorecard:
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Target Audience:
Cost: US$
Cost: A$
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Oxford is the standard for UK English, but not in this case. The spelling in this dictionary is US English.

Replace function, use a hotkey (or double-click if configured that way) to see a translation. Didn't offer the correct language, either by reading the rest of the sentence of using t selected language in Ms Word. Language recognition failed.
screen capture, Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf The dictionary provides more than a simple word-for-word translation, giving examples of many different usages in phrases together with the translation. Some of the example phrases are quite extraordinary, may be the authors were a bit punchy.
When a word is typed in the search box, possible 'matches' appear, each tabbed according to the language dictionary in which is can be found.
A major problem in using the dictionary is that it is very strict about accents. If you type a word into the search box without an accent, and the word only occurs with an accent, you will get a 'not found' error. Worse, there is no help in the very poor help file on how to type in accented text. I found the only way to do it was to type into a word processor and then copy and paste the text into the search box.

Even less attractive is the lack of support for wildcards. You can't look up pequ*, or pequ?ne, which was my first thought in trying to get around the accent problem.

Statistics:
French 175,000 words/phrases; 270,000 translations
Spanish 170,000 words/phrases; 240,000 translations; 24 regional variations
German 150,000 words/phrases; 250,000 translations.

One thing that this dictionary set does not do is pronounce the words. My first thought here was to copy the word or phrase into the clipboard and get Digit (Digalo's clipboard reader) to read it out. Select, Ctrl-C -- Nup. One cannot 'scrape', that is copy, any text from the dictionary. Apart from my wanting to hear the words pronounced correctly, copy and paste is an ideal way to ensure that words are not mistyped. The 'help' makes no mention of copy-paste functions, which is a pity because copy is not available from the title bar, nor by a keyboard shortcut, but it is an option if you select and right-click on a word or phrase.

Some of the entries are quite substantial. Trying to read them through the pop-up window, which has a fixed size is tedious.

The pop-up window is very restricted in its functionality. You cannot resize it. Again, if you ignore your training to go to the title bar, you can right-click somewhere in the window and print the entry.

Although Internet Explorer is mentioned everywhere, it does operate with Netscape Navigator.
screen capture, Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf
Registration requires an internet connection, however the software does run without a marketing cross-examination (thank you). To download further titles or upgrades from the iFinger website a minimum 56K modem is required.
Product: Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf (French, Spanish, German)
Version/Release: 1.04
Publisher: Oxford Universty Press/IFINGER
Distributor:
Language: English/French/Spanish/German
Operating System: Windows
Rec. Retail Price:
Release Media: CD or download
Accessories incl.: none
System Requirements: Winows 95, 98, Me, or NT 4.0; 166Mhz Pentium, 64Mb RAM, 80 Mb free hard disk space. Internet Explorer 4.0 or newer (on CD)
Web site: www.ifinger.com
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Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf review

Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf review

Oxford Pop-up Dictionary Shelf