Questions About Pop-Up Translators

[waiguoren]

I've been using the fairly new MDBG reader (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chinese_dictionary_windows) for some months now. The thing is a masterpiece when run on Vista--it has a large and often-updated dictionary, a built-in sentence segmenter, color-coding, a look-up feature, and only a few minor bugs.

XP is another story. The most frustrating issue is the memory leak that sucks up all my system resources after about an hour of use, but there are plenty of other problems. Does anyone else here use this software on XP for pop-up translation? If so, what issues have you encountered and how have you dealt with them? If not, is there a better program out there for this purpose?

I've experimented a bit with Dimsum but found MDBG much more convenient.

[Meng Lelan]

I use it on my XP, it's been okay. No problems except it freezes up if you leave it on for more than an hour.

I might put MDBG on my Vista though.

[waiguoren]

No problems with excessive resource consumption? When I start the program it uses about 50 MB RAM, which is acceptable. Within an hour it has doubled to 100 MB. Before long, it will use 320 MB, slowing everything down in the process.

After it freezes, do you just restart the software? That usually helps, but sometimes it persists in its zombie-state even after the restart. Does the lookup feature also stop working?

[Meng Lelan]

Yes, I restart the software if it freeze up. But quite honestly I don't use it for more than five minutes because I rarely need it. If I'm reading something extremely complicated then sometimes I turn it on.

[tooironic]

If I need to use an annotator and I'm at home I use Wenlin. If I'm out and about Chinese Tools will suffice (although its dictionary isn't the best). IMO using a web-based one is much more convenient as you don't have to stuff around with processes and what not. But that's just me.

[waiguoren]

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but anything that requires you to copy-paste your text prior to annotation seems much less convenient. MDBG translates on the fly, saving a lot of time.

[tooironic]

For a fast typist like me, CTRL + C, ALT + TAB and CTRL + V is much more convenient than having to deal with a program one has to install once and load each time one wishes to use it. But then again I don't use it that often. That reminds me though, the Firefox addon Chinese Pera-kun is not bad either for website annotation.