The Collins Series 100 Multilingual Dictionary on CD‐ROM contains eight separate dictionaries, or four bilingual pairs: English‐French, English‐German, English‐Spanish, and English‐Italian. Each lexicon pair, according to the documentation, contains over 75,000 searchable references and 110,000 translations.
Installation of the program is straightforward and fast. Dictionary pairs may be installed selectively, or all at once, for a total of a mere 6 MB of free hard disk space. The CD‐ROM itself isn’t needed after completion of the installation process. (While versions for both DOS and Windows 3.1/95/NT are available, only the Windows version will be reviewed here.)
According to technical support staff at HarperCollins Electronic Reference, the Multilingual Dictionary was originally released on floppy disk in early 1993. No amendments to the program have been made since that time, except the addition of files necessary for installation from CD. Because of this, neither the dictionary nor its user guide is as up‐to‐date as they could be. For example, the manual’s Technical Appendix provides a macro for running the dictionary within Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1. Anyone wishing to look up dictionary entries while typing a paper would find this useful; however, the macro doesn’t work “as is” with Word 97. Unfortunately, no updates to either the user guide or the software are planned.
After starting the program, users are presented with a blank window with seven menu options: File, Edit, Search, Window, Book, Font, and Help. Because it’s not readily apparent where to begin, I strongly recommend reading through the user’s manual before proceeding.
Choosing File and then Open, for example, lets users select individual dictionaries to search. Files for each of the eight dictionaries are listed mnemonically: “ef.and,” for example, represents the English to French dictionary. For easier access, though, I recommend selecting Book from the main menu instead. This option permits users to create a default list of dictionaries to consult.
Choosing Book ‐> Modify ‐> Add at this point attaches a choice of dictionaries to the menu list. Selecting a dictionary from this menu will open it for use. Depending on the monitor’s resolution, it is possible to open as many as four dictionaries at once without overlapping. After organizing the dictionaries as desired on the screen, choosing Window and Save Settings will preserve the arrangement for the next use.
Once a dictionary is opened, searching is easy. Each lexicon has two components: the Search window, on the left, in which users may type words to look up, and the Translation Entry window, which appears on the right and displays the appropriate translation when the search is done. Typing a word in the Search dialog box places users into a browsable list of “headwords,” or words with dictionary entries. Upon hitting ENTER or clicking on Search, the Translation Entry window pops up.
The definitions themselves are simple ‐ a few words at most with part of speech listed (n = noun, ad = adverb, etc.) and gender of the term, if applicable. If a headword has more than one meaning (“project,” for example), appropriate translations are listed: in German, Projekt (noun; general definition), projizieren (“to project a film”), hervorragen (“to stick out”), and so forth. Both US and British terms are included, making this product accessible to users on both sides of the Atlantic.
Double‐clicking on any word in the translation window highlights it, and then a simple CTRL‐C copies it into the clipboard so that it may be easily pasted into another application. Users will find this the easiest method to use the Multilingual Dictionary in conjunction with a word processor, unless they are adept at writing macros. It should be noted that within the Help file, the Translation Entry window is sometimes called the Story window.
Wildcard searching is available. Entering bake* in the Search box, for example, pulls up a list of all possible headwords beginning with this stem: bake, baked beans, baker, baker’s dozen, and bakery are listed in the English‐Spanish dictionary. Because the headword list for English is not the same in each of its four translating dictionaries, users will locate different matches depending on which lexicon they are searching. The English‐French and English‐Italian versions, for example, list only four matches for bake*.
As the manual states, the Dictionary has the capability of searching for words in more than one open book at once. This is deceptive, however, since the program doesn’t do quite what you’d expect. Instead of being able to type a word in the Search window and ask the program to list translations in up to four languages, users are permitted to do multiple searching only for words in the Translation Entry window. Because of this, the only way to look up multiple translations of an English word is to force an English word to appear in the Translation window by first looking it up in another language! This is counterproductive and defeats the purpose of the feature.
Other options from the main menu permit changing the font to one of six styles and fifteen point sizes (!), but not for the entire screen ‐ only for items within the Translation window. Unfortunately, those with reduced vision will still have to squint to see what they’re typing in the Search box. Just like the supposed multiple language search capability, this feature is theoretically useful but poorly implemented.
Another major stroke against this program is the cost, particularly for American users. The total price, including postage from the UK, runs approximately $60 ‐ a considerable amount for a fairly simple dictionary program, especially given its defects. Competing products, however, are similarly expensive. HarperCollins offers an additional CD‐ROM, the Collins On‐Line Multilingual Dictionary, for the same price. Though it contains additional dictionaries (French <> German and French <> Spanish as well as the Cobuild Student’s English Dictionary), coverage is less (40,000 vs. 70,000 dictionary terms). Screen shots from their web site show that the search software for the two products is not the same.
In addition, Oxford University Press’s Electronic Publishing Division offers a comparable product, the Oxford Language Shelf. This product, per the catalogue description, includes 45,000‐word mini dictionaries for French, German, English, and Spanish, with Macintosh and Windows versions. Also a UK publication, the cost is £17.01 + shipping when ordered directly from their web site (http://www1.oup.co.uk/E‐P/). American users should note that neither of these HarperCollins products nor those from Oxford’s Electronic Publishing are readily or cheaply available from US outlets. The Oxford Language Shelf, the only one of these three available directly from a US source, increases in price to $75 when purchased from their American web site (http://www.oup‐usa.org).
In sum, while the individual lexicons within the Series 100 Multilingual Dictionary are accurate and easy to search, the brevity of the definitions and the relative quantity of words included make it useful only for quick definition checking. Most individuals will find the purchase of a pocket dictionary for each of the four languages easier on the pocketbook and not much more difficult to search. Scholars will wish to invest instead in a CD‐ROM dictionary with more complete coverage of a single language. In addition, when it comes to multiple language searching and the ability to use the product from within today’s word processing programs, this title never quite lives up to its promise. Given these defects as well as the price, this is an optional purchase for most users.
