How do you say...?
By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

(November 14) - Word Point 2000, a CD-ROM with 24 language dictionaries, requires Windows 95 and up and a Pentium PC or better, or a Palm Pilot OS 3.5 system or better, by GraphoNet Ltd., POB 7234 Haifa 31071 (http://www.grapho.net/wordpoint), for all ages - Rating: *****

Will technology put human translators out of business? It would take computers with high-powered artificial intelligence to make translators obsolete. But in the meantime, a very inexpensive CD-ROM whose cut-off ends make it look like a business card with a hole in it could benefit any computer user who wants an immediate translation of words and some phrases.

You can installWord Point 2000 on your personal computer or Palm Pilot with all the languages - English vs. Hebrew, Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and back - or only some of them, depending on how much space on your hard drive you want to devote to it.

One caveat for Palm Pilot users: If you install all the dictionaries on your machine (which is quite unlikely), it will take up at least two megabytes of free space).

Any time you point your cursor at a word, a voice will translate it and various optional definitions will appear in a box on the screen. If you think you'll be confused by hearing and seeing translations even when you innocently leave the cursor somewhere on the screen, you can opt for the arrangement whereby you have to click the word to get a translation.

You can also manually key in words to be translated. The automatic appearance of a translation and the oral definition might drive you crazy when you use some programs - however, you can easily deactivate it at any time by clicking an icon on a menu bar at the bottom of your screen.

The real-time interactive dictionary translates material from any program and Web page, but its optical character recognition system gets confused when text is part of a graphic image or other object. It also refuses to translate contractions such as "doesn't" or abbreviations containing periods such as U.F.O.

Gender and part of speech information may not be available for all languages. When WordPoint cannot identify a word to translate, it displays an error message just to let you know it heard you.

GraphoNet says there are about 500,000 words in each dictionary (I didn't count); if that isn't enough, you can customize your dictionary by adding more words. Updates will be available from time to time for downloading from the company's Web site.

This clever little program is also a boon to people who love languages and are curious about how to say words in tongues in which they lack fluency.