Verily I say unto thee.

I adore leo.org as a dictionnary. It's like the good old paper dictionary, only not weighting that many stones...
Yet a dictionary isn't a translator.
It's a tool, a help, as e.g. Der Duden or Robert de Poche - the language basics have to be covered by the human brain using the tool.

aye - dict.cc is very nice too, but as I am often translating French/German and English/German I find leo.org more convenient (apart from the afore mentioned books)

For German-English I like http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/
I never liked Leo much either...

The user interface of LEO.org is much cleaner than dict.cc or equivalent.

Also you do not have to indicate the translation direction (as opposed to Google), which is extremely helpful if you work a lot in the same language pair (e.g. English-German).

If you need a more sophisticated translation tool try out http://translate.google.com/toolkit/
This allows you to upload your own glossaries (e.g. I have my own legal terminology glossary), it memorizes your past translations, allows side by side comparison of original an translation, and indicates the progress of the translation review, etc.

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How ironic that this leads to a page in German (presumably based on location) with no way to translate it to English* (google translate refuses to translate it).





*Well, you can change the URL, but that misses the point.

You can change the language: under settings - display language.

OK, thanks all. Some good recommendations there. I've no intention of deriding leo.org, which I'm sure is a fine resource for the student who already knows the language, or if I need to dig deeper into the meaning of a particular word, or if I'm writing something that needs that extra precision --but I will stick to Google translate for my normal needs, which is to quickly check phrases on cooking instructions and letters received.