The Container Pane shows all the "containers" that files or objects reside. Containers are anything that contains an object. Obvious elements are hard drives, CD's, and folders on these containers. Less obvious ones are Virtual Drives, Favorites and Network.

There are six areas within the Container Pane, or can show or not show these by clicking the Show button and selecting what you want to see.

Mac
Desktop: Your desktop folder
Network: Your volumes as seen by your network
Local/External Drives: Your mounted peripherals that are physically hooked up to the local computer you are working on.
Proprietary Drives: Your proprietary drives or CD's that Translator has identified.
Virtual Drives: Your Virtual Drives that Translator has detected in your Images folder.
Favorites: Your Favorite folders, files, aliases, or shortcuts that Translator has detected in your Favorites folder.

Only one object can be selected in the Container Pane at a time. When you select an object, its Child objects show in the Object List.

Right-clicking on an object shows a contextual menu, which expose most of the powerful features of Translator. You can convert files by selecting Convert As. and then the appropriate format. You can access the Tools (Program Tools, Sample Tools, and File Tools) areas, and the various Utilities as well.

Last but not least, you have the basic Finder/Explorer functions, such as Open, Reveal In Finder, Create Alias, Get Info/Properties, etc.

Advanced Navigation Functions
Under the Show button are two advanced functions, Show Root Folder and Go to.... Show Root Folder allows you to view only the items within a single folder. This allows you to clear out the irrelevant items in the pane and decrease the extreme amount of vertical latitude is showing. You can go back to the regular view by clicking Show again and selecting Hide Root Folder.

Go to... allows you to look at a folder without having to manually drill down to it. Of course you have to select the folder using the basic Finder Open dialog, but it allows leveraging the power of the Open dialog.