Get your translations right...
I have just created an account and looked at my first article (De Londres a Australia..."). The first word I tried, "como", was translated as "How come?", which would have been fine if the word had been "cómo", but what was needed here was "like".
If you are marketing this as a language learning tool then this sort of basic error in the first 5 minutes of use doesn't encourage me at all.
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Anonymous commented
Hernando, the point of using this website/app is to learn vocabulary. You don't learn if translations are non-existent or incorrect. Did you see the แมวปิ่งต้นไม้ before? Even in context, unknown words make no sense.
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I agree it's not 100% perfect, and requires the reader to use their judgement, taking into consideration the context and using the sidebar dictionary where necessary.
In your example, if you just added one word around the "como", for example, if you highlighted "como yo", then it would be correctly translated as "like me".
I do take your point though, and in future I may look into ways to provide more accurate translations as well as alternatives.
@Hernando: thanks for your defence of the app - much appreciated!
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Hernando commented
The strengths of Readlang are somewhere else!!!. As I see it, the tool is not about accuracy of the translation, rather, it is a tool to help you learn word in context. It helps you to "Rapidly translate the words and phrases you don’t know" and it collects those words AND their context, for you to study later.
Actually, for the inline translations I think Google Translate is used, so you can see the point is not getting the most accurate translation. There will always be some words that require more effort and let me tell you, Spanish is my mother tongue and I promise you many native speakers do not know or get right the difference between "como" and "cómo" (básicamente, tienen mala ortografía), but they are normally able to tell the difference because of the context in which the word is written. Besides, dealing with different character sets frequently require getting rid of accent marks. So, your example is actually a very tricky word, and it is very unfair to judge the tool based on it.
In any case, you can always customize the dictionary that appears in Readlang's sidebar, so you can use your preferred dictionary. If you want the most accurate translation, go get the most accurate online dictionary and tell Readland to use it in the sidebar.
But the thing is that if you only care about the accuracy of the translation, you need something different. Readlang is about reading in a foreign language with a tool that:
1) Do not intrude too much on the reading experience ...
2) But still help you quickly find the meaning of unknown words (although not 100% accurate).
3) And let you collect those new words you are learning with their context for you to study later.Do not blame the tool. Maybe you just need something else!