Pardon makes it easy and fast to find the words you're looking for. The program uses an alphabetical and logic search-technique, which lists the words beginning with the characters you have typed. For example, if you type car in the English -> French dictionary, you will get the translations for car, carafe, carbon, carbonated and carbonization.
It is important to remember that Pardon lists all words beginning with the characters typed. So, a too broad search like just a will return a huge number of words. Pardon limits the list based on your set number of maximum hits. This option is set to 100 hits by default, but can be changed in the settings dialog. Remember, though, that ploughing through a list of 500 words is generally very useless and time consuming.
Therefore, you should type as much as you know about the word you're looking for, so Pardon can narrow the search a bit more, and present as few words as possible. Pardon will narrow in the list as long as you type (the time delay can be changed in the settings dialog).
To search international dictionaries, you may require special characters such as umlauts or circumflexes. You can of course type these directly on your keyboard, if you have them available. But Pardon has a built-in QuickAccent system which enables you to type codes which is translated by the program before search. See the QuickAccent reference here. You can also right-click in the text-box and click Character Map to open up the Windows Character Map program.