A translator for the rest of us.

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Babylon is, admittedly, a wonderful tool. It's great to be able to get a translation right from the desktop, and I urge people to use it ... if they buy it. The concept of Shareware is an important one that I've urged the people in my classes to support, even if they find it extremely difficult to accept the idea that if someone is, essentially, distributing something to them for free, it's still in their interests to pay for it. But I, as usual, digress. My point is that we really don't have to have Babylon, or any other supertool that might come along. In Israel, at least, just about everybody's word processor is Word (I won't ask where they got it) and part of Word is a totally passable dictionary tool that permits us not only to check spelling, but to translate from English to Hebrew (or the reverse) and to find synonyms. Frankly, it's a a simple tool that comes in handy all the time - if people know that it's there and use it, instead of continually looking for something snazzier. And what's more, it works when we're offline.

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