Wenlin?

[Chris]

I find it has a really clunky interface - like something from the Windows 3.1 days. Another thing I don't like is, say you enter a four-character term: it only (as far as I know) searches for the entire term, and doesn't look for other terms starting with one or more of those characters. Dr. Eye does look up these partial terms.

But for sheer volume of terminology, Wenlin can't be beat. I use it all the time, and I'm constantly adding vocab I find in it into Dr. Eye - my primary translation tool.

The insane amount they charge for it isn't justifiable in my opinion, however. It doesn't surprise me one bit that it's been pirated.

[Frost]

The GUI looks like crap. If I don't see pretty things, I won't use it.

[cranky laowai]

Wenlin 4.0 has just been released. It features much better handling of Pinyin conversions and lots of other improvements. (For example, flashcards now work with words as well as single Chinese characters.) I love this program and use it often.

The interface is a bit fancier but basically the same as before, which I regard as a good thing. YMMV.

A new copy costs US$179 for the download version. To upgrade from 3.x costs US$49. So if you already have 3.x and were thinking about ordering the new ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary (included in Wenlin), you'd be well on your way to paying that.