Edit incorrect translations

How To
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Editing translations is highly encouraged to make sure you are learning the correct meaning!

There are three main places to do this:

  1. In the Explain tab, if you are an English speaker and learning a supported language, and the English explanation includes translations which differ from the main translation shown, you can click the “+” button to add them:

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  1. In the Words tab on either the reading interface or the main Readlang homepage, you can edit any of the words you have clicked on:

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  1. While practicing Flashcards. The first time you encounter a flashcard, after clicking to reveal the translation, click the little pencil icon at the bottom right of the translated side to see the edit controls.

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Hi again,

Not sure if I asked this already, but …

Have you considered ditching google translate altogether and use only the (ChatGPT?)-generated translations through context aware explanaition?

I though about this when I read in your blog that:

it’s surprisingly affordable to run. The cost of generating whole passages of text is similar to that of single word/phrase translations from the Google Translate API.

Back then I thought, ok, you may as well pay only for the generation of context aware explanations and take the translation from there, instead of paying double when the user requests the explanation.

But this came to my mind again yesterday, as I was practicing using the blitz mode, I found myself repeatedly editing the words to, basically, replace the old generated translations with the more accurate generated through the explain feature. Really, I haven’t found a single instance where the google translate translation was superior, but in many many cases the otherwise is true.

Luckily you have made it super easy to add translations from the context aware explanations to Readlang and remove the old ones. But yeah, looking ahead, perhaps it would be cool to use the more accurate translations generated through context-aware explanation.

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I’ve thought about this, since I agree that the translations in the ChatGPT generated explanations are better, at least in Spanish. I’ve even played around with doing this last year with a prompt designed just to return the translation but the results weren’t consistent enough, it also felt a bit laggier than Google Translate and the service would occasionally go down. ChatGPT seems like it’s got faster and more stable since then so it could be more feasible now and may be worth another attempt. One difficulty would be judging whether it works well in all the different languages that Readlang supports.

2 Likes
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I’ve taken another shot at ChatGPT provided context-aware translations and they seem to work pretty well! I’ve made it available as an option premium only feature for now. See here for how to enable it: New experimental feature! ChatGPT context-aware translations

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Wow!!!, I just tried it and works great!, and really impressive how fast you integrated that as a new feature. Kudos!!!

Here’s another idea for you to ponder…

I understand currently Readlang keeps track of the word/phrase, and a bunch of translations of that word/phrase (1…*) and also a bunch contexts associated to that word/phrase. But not sure it saves the link between translation and context.

If Readlang can keep track of context-specific translations, I think that could make the Flashcards and the Blitz mode practice much better. Here’s why:

For words with multiple translations, the flashcards show (I think) all of them. Sometimes they are rather synonyms, but sometimes words can simply have very different meanings according to the context, and having all those alternatives presented might be confusing. If Readlang keeps track of the context-specific translations, it could show only the context-relevant translations, IMHO, leading to a cleaner and more effective studying experience.

Just a silly example to illustrate what I mean. If you have saved the word “gato” in Spanish, I think it is better to practice each of these flashcards separately,

Context: "Mi gato duerme en el sofá todo el día."
Translation: cat

Context: "Necesito un gato para cambiar la llanta del coche."
Translation: car jack

instead of getting both translations at the same time (“cat / car jack”) as it would work nowadays.

So, yeah, again, it’s just an idea for you to ponder. I do not want to come across as putting pressure to add features all the time. It just seems to me that with much better context-aware translations now, you can keep track of that link and take advantage of it to improve the overall experience for Readlang users.

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Yeah, it’s a very good point and one I’ve thought about. It’s not a trivial change but I’ll keep thinking about it!