One feature I would love to see implemented on Readlang is the ability to merge words that are separated by other words for context-aware translation as well as regular translation. Consider the following example from a German text:
“Hast du nicht? Dann hol das unbedingt nach.”
In this example, hol and nach actually represent a single semantic unit - the verb nachholen - which means “to catch up/to make up.”
There is one crucial difference between German and English phrasal verbs: English phrasal verbs often stay together (“Then be sure to catch up”), while German phrasal verbs frequently appear in separate parts of the sentence (“Dann hol das unbedingt nach”).
Because of this, translating these German verbs is a bit jarring in virtually all of the apps I have tried. One website that attempts to rectify this problem is lemmatize.com. It attempts to do so by automatically detecting and selecting semantic units, but I’ve found it not to work as expected most of the time.
Fortunately, learners of languages like German don’t need this automatic detection at all. We can identify these semantic units ourselves. What we need is an easy way to tell a translation app/LLM what we want translated/explained. And Readlang already seems to have the necessary infrastructure for it.
There already exist two options for merging: “Don’t Merge” and “Merge Phrases”. I suggest adding a third one, something like “Always Merge”, which will allow the user to merge selected words even if they are apart. For instance, in the example sentence I provided above, if I click on hol and then on nach, the app will translate hol nach if the “Always Merge” option is selected, instead of first translating hol and then nach separately, as it does with the “Merge Phrases” option currently.
Thanks for the suggestion. Handling of phrasal verbs is a long standing issue, but it seems only to be an issue for German learners so it never feels that worth it to address since German learners are a small fraction of the total. That said, it’s come up often enough that I’m tempted to think more about it.
It also comes up in Slavic languages with reflexive verbs; some are compositional in meaning (Czech “umýt se” to wash oneself), many are not (Czech “radovat se” to be joyful).
Moreover, English phrasal verbs also consist of two elements that may be separated by other words in the sentence (“could you pick them up?”).
People also occasionally insert stuff into idioms one might want to learn (“…still grateful that Sport England footed a £165m bill for the 2002 Commonwealth Games”; foot a/the bill (for sth) – be responsible for paying the cost of sth). I suppose this kind of word play happens in all languages.
This feature really is needed for Dutch language as well. Seperable verbs are an essential part of Dutch language too as it shares the majority of German vocabulary and grammar. I’ve been using readlang to improve my Dutch vocabulary for a long time but it’s really painful when it comes to seperable verbs.
It’s also an issue for Swedish learners (and I suppose Norwegian and Danish as well), although I understand we’re a minority. What I do right now is translating the whole phrase and then I either don’t bother to save those translations or I save only the “main” verb or word and count on my brain to be able to search for the missing part whenever I encounter it. Not ideal, but bearable.
It’s quite the challenge that is readily apparent for German. I see AI as a hopeful tool to analyze enough of the context to put two and two together and find the connection. “abholen” is a great example in German. “Ich hole Dich ab.”
The downside of AI is that it infers translation when it’s not helpful – when you want to isolate the word. But Readlang reader’s integration with a dictionary allows the experiened language learner to compensate for that.