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I’ve been using the Babylon Translation software on-off for many years and I think it’s a great tool. However there are some things which bother me a lot:

- My mother language is German and I noticed that quite a lot of articles are wrong in the German-English translation. Also some of the definitions seem to be completely wrong to me. It seems they didn’t really double-check their entries. I took the time to send them an email but it took them many weeks to even acknowledge my email. I estimate that I’ve found about 20-30 articles which are wrong, and about 2-3 wrong meanings in the German-English dictionary. If you need a reliable dictionary I recommend Oxford. Pity they don’t have a similar application, they could make a lot of money.

- Another thing I found is that their “perpetual licences” aren’t really “for ever”.  The support chat on the sales page seems to be single-mindedly concentrating on upgrading you to the new version which requires a new “perpetual licence”.  In the end I was forced to buy the third “perpetual licence” because on Vista the old version didn’t work properly.

- They also have an affiliate program but even though I made a lot of leads, I never made sale. I wonder why is that. You can set up the affiliate program to notify you by email when you’ve made a lead (a user downloaded the program) or a sale. You can’t set it up to only get an email when you’ve made a sale, which is really annoying if you constantly get emails about leads, when in reality you only want a notification email when you’ve made a sale.

Apart from that I think it’s a nifty tool, I wonder why there aren’t any other software companies which offer something similar. At least I don’t know any serious competitors.