Overview of ABBYY Lingvo for Mac

ABBYY, and all the products of this company, was associated with me, until recently, exclusively with the Windows world. But time goes on and the company expanded its product line, first FineReader for Mac was released, and now Lingvo for Mac. I will say right away that the last time I used products from Abbyy more than four years ago, so I can not compare the difference in the functionality of the Mac version and the Wibdows version. But I’ll say that I use dictionaries for poppy often, even very, I tried TranslateIt !, and Slovoed, and a bunch of other programs, but in the end I settled on the built-in Dictionary.app, can Lingvo replace Dictionary.app for me, now I’ll try understand.

Description from the program website :ABBYY Lingvo for Mac is an electronic dictionary designed specifically for the Macintosh platform. A unique set of 125 dictionaries contains 6 pairs of directions of translation from Russian into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and vice versa. ABBYY Lingvo for Mac also includes explanatory Russian dictionaries, grammar guides, phrasebooks, language and study guides, educational dictionaries, and the world-famous English dictionaries Oxford and Collins. Languages:

• English
• Deutsch
• French
• Italian
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Russian

The cost of the boxed version is 1490 rubles, the version for download is 1340 rubles. Immediately it becomes not clear why a user who needs, for example, only English dictionaries, needs to pay for Portuguese, Italian, etc. ?! By the way, if you are a Windows user, then you have the opportunity to purchase only the English version for only 760 rubles. I suppose that such discrimination of the Mac version is caused by the company's desire to recoup development costs as soon as possible. Which is quite understandable.



The image of the program weighs 800 megabytes, during installation it takes a little more than a gigabyte. Why so much? I don’t know, I suppose that the whole thing is in audio files with voice acting.

Before launching the program, I already managed to read the "ego" number of dissatisfied comments about the terrible interface. And at the first boot I was preparing for the worst, but I did not see anything wrong, moreover, the program interface turned out to be more than pleasant. Yes, maybe the UI is not so “sexy”, but it is quite nice. If you really want to look at the bad interface, here is SlovoEd for Mac.



There are flaws in the interface, of course, but they are not so serious. Well, that’s why I can’t disable my unused dictionaries as a class? It is incomprehensible ...



Also, there is no way to include the search sequence in dictionaries, that is, search first in one dictionary, and only then in another. In the same Dictionary.app this is implemented.



And you can select the dictionary only in the window with the search results. The disadvantages of this can be seen in the screenshot below, for example, I would like the dictionary with technical vocabulary to be with high priority.



There is a pop-up window function with the translation of a word when you hover over it, unlike Dictionary.app in the pop-up window we are immediately offered several values ​​from different dictionaries (unless, of course, the values ​​are not very long and the window size allows them to be placed)



But first all you need to understand is that when you buy an electronic dictionary, you buy dictionary entries and only then a program for using them. But once again, Lingvo is famous for its dictionaries. Here ABBYY is beyond competition.
True, an unpleasant surprise was the lack of the ability to connect external dictionaries. What managed to fix on their own. You just need to drop the Lingvo format dictionaries into / Applications / ABBYY \ Lingvo.app/Contents/Resources/Dictionaries/ and correct with your hands / Applications / ABBYY \ Lingvo.app/Contents/Resources/ApplicationDefaults.plist .
ABBYY's Lingvo for Mac turned out to be an excellent product that you can safely recommend to anyone whose work or study is related to foreign languages.