Firstly, I am so delighted to have discovered this platform - it is literally what I have been looking for. I have shared it on the TES discussion board I’m on and will be promoting to my students (when I start my SCITT) in September. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
One thing I notice is that sometimes the translation feels a tiny bit off - for example when translating “cadre” it offered “frame” - but actually that didn’t fit for the sentence… but “dans le cadre de” means in context of or within the scope of … a little different. I see it working when there is something like coral and then reef - you tap the word next door, but I wonder if there is a way of taking these “lexical chunks” to use my new teacher jargon and translating as a whole?
Yes, this site calls this “Context Aware” translations (vs. “Basic” ones) that can be turned on in the Settings tab if you have premium. With “Context Aware” it seems to run the whole sentence against an LLM, whereas “Basic” translations are just one word checked by itself through Google Translate, I believe.
Yes. Drag across the words before releasing and the whole chunk gets translated as one unit. I’ve just tried your example and “dans le cadre de” comes back as “as part of”. It’s saved to your Word List as a single flashcard too, so you can practice the chunk rather than the individual words.
The coral reef behaviour you spotted is the “Merge Phrases” setting, which is on by default. With it on, clicking a word next to one you’ve already highlighted merges the two into a phrase, so you can also build a chunk up word by word instead of dragging. You’ll find it in the reader Settings tab (open a text, click the button at the top right to open the sidebar, then Settings) under Translation Behavior, along with the rest of the options.
@M_C is right about Context Aware translations too. With this enabled you can often get away with clicking single words or shorter phrases and still get the correct meaning because it is taking the surrounding context into account. (This option is only available on the Premium plans though)
Thanks for the kind words, and for sharing Readlang on the TES board. Please let me know if you hit anything else once you’re up and running with your students.