Since 4 or 5 days I have the problem that Babylon translator often offers no translation from English to German. This wasn’t the case one or two weeks ago. I got translations in 95 to 100 % of the cases (I never use the user hints; I always create my own hints). Now for 30 to 50 percent of the LingQs is no translation available. I asked other German members, and they’ve experienced the same problem.
Has something changed with Babylon translator? The Babylon translator is (was) the most convenient way to create new LingQs because I don’t have to open a new window or tab.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much control over the Babylon translator. That data is fed directly from Babylon’s servers. It seems to be working well for me right now in Swedish, although the Swedish-English dictionary is not very complete. See if it improves over the next little while. Otherwise, you will have to use the other dictionaries. Once used to the other window opening, I find the Other Dictionaries often much better and just as convenient as the integrated Babylon dictionary. Of course, it depends on the language as different dictionaries are better for different language combinations.
This may not be an IE8 specific problem, but the problem I mentioned in the Open German Forum is (question marks in dict.leo.org, Lingvo, Rambler, wrong language in PONS - English instead of Russian, words with accents are not translated automatically). I tried Google Chrome and these dictionaries show good results. Babylon doesn’t show any results or maybe one in twenty.
@ Mark: I didn’t know you feel so strongly about this topic, it seems to have caused your fingers to stay on the button: I got six or seven copies of your post!
I have recently noticed the same problem as Vera when translating from Spanish to English. Some words have a Babylon translation and others don’t. It used to be that every word had a Babylon translation.
I must say I have no issues with Babylon at the moment in a variety of language combinations. The thing to keep in mind is that when Babylon has no results for a specific word or phrase it won’t show.
Mark, but it worked better during the last two years! Like I wrote above “I got translations in 95 to 100 % of the cases (I never use the user hints; I always create my own hints). Now for 30 to 50 percent of the LingQs is no translation available.”
The problem is that it is more worse than earlier. Is there a special reason? For example, has Babylon limited the free version, or something like that. Or has Babylon changed the parameters? The problem occurs since last week.
It seems we have now been able to locate why this was causing problems. In the midst of recent changes, Babylon also changed they way their dictionary functioned so it wasn’t working properly on our site. We have now uploaded a fix for this so everything should be working fine.
Please let us know if you continue to experience any problems.
