Quick Comparison Guide To Dr.Eye 8.0 Versions

Language Learning Chinese
1

Here’s a quick “Comparison Guide” to the Dr.Eye 8.0 packages available in Taiwan. The feature sets between the different packages has changed since 7.0 and as far as I can tell the feature comparison chart is only available in the manual, which doesn’t help you decide which version to buy.

There are at least four packaged versions of Dr.Eye 8.0 available in Taiwan:

Dr.Eye 8.0 Luxury (Orange Box $1090 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional Upgrade (Blue Box $1090 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional (Blue Box $1650 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional 2-User Pack (Blue Box $3300 MSRP)

To find the MSRP (retail price) look under the bar code at the bottom right of the back of the box.

Unlike previous versions, the “Luxury” package no longer contains “Chinese Traditional to English” translation functions. It only contains “Chinese Traditional to/from Chinese Simplified”, “English to Chinese Traditional” and “English to Chinese Simplified”. Because of this, it is probably of limited use to most foreigners who will probably want to translate from Chinese more often than the reverse.

Instead, you will probably be better off with the Professional package which in addition to the above also supports “Chinese Traditional to English”, “Chinese Simplified to English” and “Japanese to/from Chinese Traditional”. The other major difference is that the Professional package also contains more dictionaries.

If you decide to get the Professional package, be careful you don’t get the upgrade version by mistake (unless you are actually upgrading). The easiest way to tell is to make sure the MSRP on the back of the package is $1650.

Dr.Eye 8.0 lists in the system requirements that it requires the Traditional Chinese version of XP/2003/Vista but it actually works fine on the English version of XP. (Presumably you would have to have the East Asian support added, but this is a standard feature of XP which can be added from the XP installation disk.) It also comes with the user interface in English, Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese all on the same disk.

One other potential catch if you have old computer gear: The package comes on DVD, not CD.

Note: Though the Professional ‘2-User Pack’ list price is exactly twice that of the single-user version, the street price is only about 50% more.

2

NT1650 is really cheap. Years ago when I looked at Dr Eye it was around NT7000.

This is the software that let’s you see what a character means in English just by letting the mouse arrow hover over it, right?

BTW, where can I get this in taiwan? Now that I’m set on learning to read, and making good progress, I will be wanting this soon.

3

That is one of its basic features (they call it ‘instant translation’) but it can also do translations of full documents and web pages at the sentence level, read out text, and lots more.

I got mine at Tsann Kuen 3C but pretty much anyplace that has any computer software should have it. I’ve seen it lots of places.

4

I found out about the lack of Chinese-English full-text translation to my chagrin only AFTER I bought the “luxury” edition (which by the way works fine on English Windows). I thought it was a standard feature, as it was standard on older versions.

I find the User-Defined Glossary feature to be very slow on version 8 (admittedly, I do have over 3000 vocab words in it but under version 6 it was lightning fast on a crappy old computer, and in V. 8 it’s sluggish on my Pentium Dual-Core with 2GB RAM). Overall, though, Version 8 is faster than the horribly clunky Version 7.

Bugs still exist: Opening up the Instant Dictionary window still empties your clipboard, Instant Transaltion still defaults to translating to Japanese when the font is anything other than §MingLiu or Ximingti. They did, however, fix the bug that in the past required entries to the User-Defined Glossary to be colored “automatic” only. Earlier versions would reject other colors, even though theoretically it should just care about the text that was entered, not the formatting.

I’d spend the money for another version if I knew it had a “Chinese Only” option (i.e. it would show definition pop-ups for Chinese words only, not for English) for Instant Translation - so that it doesn’t constantly try to translate, say, English menu items in the software I use. The Luxury version, and past versions of Dr. Eye had “English Only” mode, useful for local Taiwanese, but not for adogahs like me.

Can anyone confirm yes or no about “Chinese Only” in more advanced versions of the software? (As it is, “English Only” can be found at System Setup => Instant Translation -> English Only checkbox)

5

MM, if it turns out that the professional version has the feature I’m looking for, I could sell you the copy I currently have. It has the instant pop-up translation feature you mentioned.It doesn’t have full-text translation in Chinese-English, though. But that’s not necessary for learning Chinese.

6

I have version 7.0 and find that it has a few bugs. Example: You are chatting with friends on msn, suddenly the instant translation function stops working. Close down dr eye and restart, it happens again 5 minutes later, close down, restart dr eye…etc
A bit annoying. Apart from this it really is an excellent tool.
In fact…sod it… i’m going to get the new one now… report later…

Has anyone tried Kingsoft? How does it compare to dr eye?
Maybe buy that one too.

付錢買學中文的工具是一天最快樂的事

7

Sure, I’ll buy it off you if you find the other one better suited to your needs. I only really care about the pop-up translation and a few other minor features.

8

Yeah, same for me. I could only find the 7.0 comparison table online and in that version the Standard version had Chinese to English and Pro mainly got you the Japanese support. I foolishly assumed that 8.0 would be similar. Fortunately the Luxury version of 8.0 is good enough for Mrs. jlick, so she will get my copy of that one and I’ll go get a Professional version for myself. My post was primarily intended as a “Don’t make the same stupid mistake I did!” warning.

(It is also somewhat ironic that translation software would use the English term ‘Luxury’ when ‘Deluxe’ is probably a better translation, and more in line with the usage in other software products.)

9

I bought the $1650 one. So far so good. Been using it with msn, skype, and all the other usual things. Hasn’t crashed at all. Much better than 7.0

Hurrray!

10

[quote=“jacktorrence”]I bought the $1650 one. So far so good. Been using it with msn, skype, and all the other usual things. Hasn’t crashed at all. Much better than 7.0

Hurrray![/quote]

Does it have a “Chinese Only” option for Instant Translation? (E.g., “English Only” can be found at System Setup => Instant Translation -> English Only checkbox; is there a checkbox for Chinese Only?)

11

There is no Chinese only option.

There is a “catch mode” option which you can set. You can choose to use the mouse right click,or CTRL button, or CTRL and right click to activate the instant translation function. Right now I have the instant translation function set to (CTRL key), so the instant translation box only opens when the cursor is over a word and I press CTRL. When I do this, the translation box opens. It stays fixed on the screen until I press CRTL over another word. Meanwhile, as I move my cursor over other words, a much smaller translation box flashes up. It is much less detailed, and it only pops up when I’m over English words.

To be honest, I need to play with the settings a bit more.

12

Darn. I should contact the company and suggest it as a feature for Version 9.

As it is, I use the ctrl-right-click “catch mode” option, which to me is the least inconvenient of the options, but it’s still a pain. If only they offered more choices, such as mapping it to a function key. A “Chinese-only” option would solve my biggest complaint with the package - the annoying habit of translating stuff that isn’t on the document itself.

I may buy the more expensive version anyway for the C-E text translation capabilities. Sometimes it can give me clues to the gist of convoluted sentences.

13

You may find that Adso will do what you want – and for free. Unfortunately, the site is down again at the moment. Similarly, try out News in Chinese; but that’s from the same people and so also down right now. :frowning:

14

Been using it for a month now. Absolutely no problems. Fantastic bit of software.

15

Ahhhh, I new it was too good to be true. Sometimes have problems when using msn or Word. When I’m chatting with firends on msn, sometimes I’ll type some Chinese and I want to check one or two characters before I “send” the text. Quite often, Dr eye comes up with “not in dictionary” or a completely wrong translation. However, after I have sent the text, (my friend has got the message) I can now use Dr eye on those characters and it will give me the correct translation. Similar, strange things sometimes happen on Word. This never happens on skype. Is this something to do with character encoding or something?

我不懂!