Back in 1999 I was writing my doctoral thesis for which I had to tackle many foreign texts and the sheer number of printed dictionaries was making my work nearly impossible. I decided to go online and to search for dictionaries. I came across Babylon, a desk top application giving translation in a one-click. To the ease of my student budget Babylon was even a freeware. Serving results in many languages this was real dissertation heaven.



Then, like many companies do after they established an essential user group, Babylon changed its policy in 2001 and started to charge for their software. This didn’t go without causing some upheaval among users who had submitted their glossaries to freely share them with their colleagues on Babylon.

Recently, however, I googled on the term Geography dictionary and to my biggest surprise a Babylon page came up first. As it is often the case, I was expecting to find a single dictionary containing only basic terms and definitions. This one was different: Instead of one dictionary, I landed upon a collection compiled by some pretty authoritative names in the field.

Digging deeper into the site it showed that Babylon rearranged their content as a free Lookup service and by this made their database of public content available for free. Not a tiny thing; right now they claim to have 1300 dictionaries in 75 languages. It might have been only by pure chance, but that seems to have happened just around the time Babylon Ltd. went public on the stock exchange or did they finally embrace some of Web2.0 approaches?

Beside the late satisfactions for the private glossary builders to see their content freely available again, Babylon’s lookups are convenient as they are combining several resources into categories. So instead looking up different pages Babylon offers easy lookups from one search box.

Concerning the navigability of the Lookup page, the site is pretty disappointing: Unless one lands directly on the main Lookup page one might miss out on the vast collection of glossaries which ranges from Acronyms and Abbreviations to Zoology. Also thumbs down for the fact that so far they have only English, German and Spanish categories. Let’s hope they will soon add all the other languages they cover.

But what is there so far is very convenient, I found answers to whatever term I searched for. Babylon retrieves as many results as possible in the order of relevance: first it shows the results from the lookup category you are searching in, and then it gives you the result of the term in other glossaries available and even articles from Wikipedia. So you hardly ever leave this place empty handed.

Babylon’s field of expertise is no doubt language dictionaries in popular as well as rare combinations, e.g. English Spanish Dictionary, German Turkish Dictionary, Spanish Danish Dictionary. But despite Babylon’s slogan “translation @ a click" the categories of the new lookups, like e.g. Marketing Dictionary, Law Dictionary and Health Dictionary, clearly show that they are also aiming at monolingual reference sources.

Final question is: how long will this last before being asked again to pay? I am skeptic of any altruism coming from a highly commercial company such as Babylon, but I do have to admit that their new Lookup is an impressive service. So, my advice is: Enjoy while you can. It rocks and meanwhile it is free.