SlovoEd 6 Deluxe for Windows from Paragon Software is a very handy dictionary for language translation.

As well as designing a host of Windows utilities such as Partition Manager and Drive Backup, Paragon Software has made a name of itself in developing translation dictionaries under the SlovoEd name. These are designed for mobile platforms such as Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry — but are also available as standalone installations for a Windows PC.

We tried SlovoEd 6 Deluxe Russian-English dictionary, one of nine European languages supported, including German, French, Italian and Spanish.

By default SlovoEd 6 Deluxe dictionary installs a shortcut in the Taskbar. Clicking this brings up the SlovoEd dictionary in quick time, as it will already have been loaded at system startup. Also from here it's possible with a right click to reverse the translation direction or set SlovoEd as Always on Top.

Enter a word to look up in the search field and a separate window immediately pops up with the required translation. It really is very simple to use, and using Advanced mode you can keep search word and result all in one window. Like a print dictionary, the found word is represented as type — such as n (noun), v (verb) — along with the syllable to stress. This is particularly useful in Russian, since the difference in sound between stressed and unstressed vowels is quite marked, and getting syllable stress is key to learning good Russian pronunciation.

Any word that appears in the translation window as part of the first word's translation can be subsequently double-clicked, taking you to that word's own entry page. And after searching for a few words you will notice that previous searches are easy to recover, using tabs that appear at the bottom of the window, or a History sidebar. The listing of UK/US spelling variants and even some notes on slang usage were welcome extra touches.

One of the proud features of this range of dictionaries is a word pronunciation function, using real audio samples, but most unfortunately this only works for English words in this Russian language version. Students of Spanish, German, French and Italian however should find their translated words available and spoken by native speakers.