SuperDic 3.0

[Emilio Millan]

                A Review of Leon Ungier's SuperDic 3.0
                --------------------------------------

First, the standard disclaimer: I have no financial stake in SuperDic
3.0; I write this review in exchange for a review copy of the program.

SuperDic 3.0 by Leon Ungier (ungierl at ccmail.orst.edu) is an electronic
Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary for the IBM PC and
compatibles.  (If Leon's name seems familiar, it may be from your use
of his Russian-English On-Line Dictionary 1.35, a shareware
predecessor to SuperDic 3.0.  This earlier program is available as
RUSEN135.ZIP from your favorite wuarchive/SimTel-mirror FTP site in
the msdos/educatin directory.)  SuperDic is a DOS application, though
it will run under Microsoft Windows in the MS-DOS Prompt application.
Further, SuperDic can be run as a terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR)
program, which means that it can be invoked and dismissed from within
DOS applications.  As such, one may use SuperDic without having to
incur the overhead in time and keystrokes associated with quitting a
program and starting another and then back again.  This comes in very
handy when, for example, you are using a word processor to produce a
translation and want to use SuperDic as well.  (When loaded as a TSR
program, SuperDic occupies 35K of memory which is a bit big as far as
TSRs go, but is far from excessive.)

Much good can be said about SuperDic 3.0.  For one, installation is
gloriously simple; one needn't muck around with (possibly
incompatible) Cyrillic screen and keyboard drivers as this is taken
care of automatically.  Configuration is likewise simple; SuperDic
automatically identifies the video adapter to be used and the user can
easily set such options as the keyboard layout, the default dictionary
(Russian-English or Russian-English) and the key combination which
will invoke SuperDic from DOS or a DOS application.  (SuperDic
apparently saves these options in the SuperDic application file.  This
leaves one less file lying about, but it also triggers virus-detection
programs which look for such suspicious activity as the modification
of an executable file.)

The lexicographic data contained in SuperDic 3.0 is far better than
that contained in the electronic Russian-English/English-Russian
dictionaries, such as LingVo, Wordbox, Transfer and others, which have
come out of the (former) Soviet Union and are replete with
questionable renderings and outright spelling errors, especially in
the English headwords and renderings.  According to Ungier, the
Russian-English dictionary embodied in SuperDic is primarily based on
Ozhegov's Slovar' russkogo iazyka--which presumably means that the
English-language renderings are his own--with additional material
being drawn from other sources including Ludmilla Ignatiev Callaham's
excellent Russian-English Chemical and Polytechnic Dictionary.  Ungier
claims 50,000+ headwords, a figure I haven't confirmed but one I have
no reason not to believe.  The English-Russian Dictionary, a later
addition to Ungier's program--recall that version 1.35 contained only
a Russian-English component--seems to me to draw heavily from the
first half of Kenneth Katzner's English-Russian Russian-English
Dictionary, though in general for any given word, Ungier provides
fewer renderings than Katzner.

Ungier offers users a number of convenient program features and means
of access to the dictionaries.  Among these are the capability of the
SuperDic to display two half-screen windows, one into each dictionary,
a means of exiting SuperDic such that the currently selected word is
inserted into the underlying application, and the so-called SWIT (Show
While I Type) mode which updates the search result with each
keystroke--when the word you want appears, you can stop typing.

The automatic cross-reference feature, which permits the user to
select a word in a gloss in one dictionary and, with a single
keystroke, look it up in the other dictionary, is of enormous utility.
As much as lexicographers--especially those producing bilingual
dictionaries--try to eliminate the need for cross referencing, it is
inevitably something that a sophisticated user will end up having to
do.  By making this process as easy as he has, Ungier has done users a
great service.

The idea of displaying on screen a keyboard map is a very good one.
Those who can touch-type Russian or who have keyboard stickers may
turn the keyboard map off, but for the rest of us it is an enormous
and very welcome help.

Program performance is very good, even in SWIT mode; there is
essentially no delay associated with looking up a word on a 33 MHz
486-based system.  Moreover, the program seems relatively bug-free;
the only two I've found have to do with (1) the lookup of word not
present in the dictionary (instead of the cursor being placed where
the word would have been, it is placed elsewhere, seemingly influenced
by letters later in the word), and (2) the execution of the SuperDic
installation program with SuperDic installed, either to deinstall it
or to change program parameters (this sometimes hangs).

Lexicographers, as has been noted over two centuries ago by one of the
greatest in their ranks, Samuel Johnson, must endure an inordinate
share of criticism.  Wrote Johnson, "Every other author may aspire to
praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach."
Unfortunately, I cannot excuse Mr. Ungier or his SuperDic from a few
words of suggestion and, yes, some criticism.  I hope not to offend,
but rather to contribute in small measure to SuperDic's improvement.

The Personal Dictionary Manager is poorly integrated into the program
as a whole.  Personal dictionaries are strictly distinct from the two
dictionaries provided by Ungier in that they can not be merged
together and the means of accessing Ungier's dictionaries and your own
are completely dissimilar.  The Personal Dictionary Manager is by far
and away the weakest aspect of SuperDic 3.0.

Browsing the dictionary could be made much easier by allowing the user
to jump a screen at a time using the [PgUp] and [PgDn] keys.  At
present these do the same as the [Up Arrow] and [Down Arrow] keys, to
wit, they move the cursor one line vertically.

Russian words in SuperDic always appear in all capital letters.  This
has two unfortunate side effects.  One is that the proper
capitalization of the word is concealed.  Insofar as the conventions
for capitalization of English and Russian differ, students and others
unfamiliar with these differences may make such errors as capitalizing
words which are generally capitalized in English but not in Russian
(e.g., "russkii" ("Russian"), "ozero Baikal" ("Lake Baikal") and
"vtoraia mirovaia voina" ("World War II")).  The second side effect is
that stressed vowels, indicated by the superimposition of an acute
accent, must be distorted--scrunched down to accommodate the
accent. The resulting character is unattractive.  Insofar as headword
and gloss already appear in different colors--a good idea,
incidentally--there should be no reason to restrict Russian words to
uppercase only.

I would also suggest the addition of two features which would be
welcomed by anyone with as dismal a short-term memory as mine.  When I
translate with the aid of a traditional paper dictionary, I frequently
look back and forth between my source text and the dictionary, for
example in the course of looking up a long or peculiarly spelled word,
or to try out different renderings in context.  It would be nice to be
able to switch back and forth between SuperDic and, say, a word
processor quickly and repeatedly.  SuperDic would, I suggest, be
improved by allowing the user to be able to press the same key
combination to dismiss SuperDic as was used to invoke it.
Accompanying this change would need to be a modification of SuperDic's
behavior so that the display appearing on screen when SuperDic is
dismissed would be restored when SuperDic is once again invoked.  (At
present, SuperDic returns instead to its initial display.)

Finally, when SuperDic is invoked, it occupies the entire screen.  At
times it would be preferable to have it occupy only a small and
possibly movable window, placed so as not to obscure the position of
the cursor in the application from which SuperDic was invoked.  This
is how LingVo behaves, and I believe that is one of LingVo's features
worth imitating.

Further information on the program are available directly from Mr.
Ungier at AlefZero Software, 1640 NW 17th, Corvallis, OR, 97330 (USA).
Again, his e-mail address is:  ungierl at ccmail.orst.edu

The program is not free.  You can write to him for pricing information.

                                      Emilio Millan
                                      emillan at cd.com