Dear users,

We are thrilled to announce a new feature on our translation website that will take language learning to the next level.

As a platform dedicated to providing translations of words into dozens of foreign languages, we are constantly striving to enhance the user experience and support learners in their language activities. We are excited to introduce audio pronunciations, allowing users to not only see the translations but also listen to the pronunciation of words in over 40 languages. This addition will aid learners in improving their language skills, developing accurate pronunciation, and gaining confidence in their language abilities.

With the inclusion of audio pronunciations, our users can now access a comprehensive language learning resource. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced learner, hearing the correct pronunciation of words can significantly impact your language acquisition. The combination of visual translations and audio pronunciations offers a multi-sensory learning experience that caters to various learning styles and preferences. It is a valuable tool for improving pronunciation accuracy, rhythm, and intonation, while also fostering a deeper connection to the language being studied.

Our audio pronunciations feature covers a wide range of languages. By offering pronunciations for over 40 languages, including widely spoken ones like English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as lesser-known languages, we aim to create an inclusive platform that respects linguistic diversity and encourages exploration of different cultures.

We hope that this new feature will inspire learners to embark on exciting language journeys, develop their pronunciation skills, and foster a deeper appreciation for languages and cultures. Start exploring the world of words and their sounds with our enhanced language learning platform today!

The IDL team

Dear team,

We are happy to bring you some good news. We have introduced Expert-level accounts on IDL, and they are going to take your experience to a new level. Whether you are a language enthusiast, a professional translator, or just someone who loves contributing, the Expert account will offer you great opportunities for growth and influence. Let’s dive into the features and benefits that come with being an IDL Expert.

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Unrestricted Editing and Contribution

With an Expert-level account, you have the freedom to create and modify content without needing approvals. Say goodbye to waiting for the green light and hello to making a direct impact. Your expertise and ideas can now reach the IDL community faster than ever before, making the process of improving content more efficient.

Maximum IDL Points

As an Expert, each edit you make earns you the highest number of IDL points. These points showcase your expertise and dedication while measuring your influence within the IDL community. The more you contribute, the higher you will climb in the rankings, establishing yourself as an authority in the language-learning ecosystem.

Influence and Mentorship

As an Expert, your knowledge and insights carry significant weight. Users across the platform will benefit from your contributions, relying on your expertise to expand their language proficiency. By sharing your knowledge, you shape the learning experiences of others and become a mentor figure within the IDL community.

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The introduction of Expert-level accounts on IDL represents a significant milestone in the platform’s mission to promote and simplify language learning. With unrestricted editing privileges, maximum IDL points, and the opportunity to influence and mentor others, Experts are poised to make a profound impact on the community. Whether you are a language professional or a language learner, embracing the Expert account will enable you to showcase your skills, contribute to the platform’s growth, and play an important role in shaping the language-learning journey of countless individuals worldwide.

The IDL team

Dear IDL users and language enthusiasts,

Our latest update that went out into the world a few weeks ago contained a couple of new opportunities for you to work with words and languages on our platform.

Firstly, we added 20 new languages to the English version of our website, including:

African: Amharic, Shona, Xhosa, Kinyarwanda

European: Corsican, Frisian, Luxembourgish, Scots Gaelic, Tatar

Asian: Kyrgyz, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, Odia, Turkmen, Uyghur

Austronesian: Hawaiian, Samoan, Sundanese

Middle Eastern: Kurdish (Jumanji)

We have uploaded translations for these languages, though we do need your help in order to improve them. If you know both English and one of the above languages on a native or advanced level, you can create a Professional account to edit the data and improve any translation that you want.

Sometimes, our users don’t want to upgrade their Basic accounts to Professional ones; they might think that doing so would cost them something or bring some complications. And so, it’s worth mentioning that all of our accounts are free of charge! The Professional accounts are just a way to interact more deeply with our database so you can contribute and share your knowledge with other people who are learning languages, or even just looking for a few words to complete their homework or select a name for a character in a new story.

Secondly, since there are more than 100 languages in the system now, we have decided that this is the right moment to introduce a new language-sorting option – by language family. We regularly got this request from our users.

Like the alphabetical sorting option, this new mode is available to our registered users. Both Basic and Professional accounts can do this. However, one additional point to consider is that the sorting feature becomes available when you have at least 10 languages added to your list. Otherwise, there are just a few languages and you don’t need to sort them.

Right now, we’re working on a major new version which introduces Expert-level accounts; these will be for the most powerful users who work with the dictionary. This next version will transform interacting with our content into an even more fun and engrossing process that will be a pleasure to participate in.

Our team wishes you all the best for the coming holidays and hopes you have a healthy and lucky 2021.

Regards,
The IDL Team

Dear IDL users,

We’re glad to say “Hello!” after a few months of working hard to develop our platform.

We have a few news items to share, and we hope you’ll enjoy them!

1) Mobile applications. We’ve received a lot of requests to create IDL mobile applications for Android and iOS devices, and in this update, we laid the groundwork for these applications. We already have a prototype that we’re planning to tighten up and give to you to experiment with by the end of the year.

2) An improved search engine. Our search engine respects the language that is set in the search box near the search icon. By default, this language is English in the English version of the website, Spanish in the Spanish version, and so on.

Let’s take the English version as an example. If you search for the word “home” with English set as the language in the search box, you will see a page with translations of the word home into almost 90 other languages. If you then change the language in the search box and repeat your search, you will see the specific translation of your original (English) word into that selected language.

The best part here is that when you change the language – for example, to Spanish from English in the English version of the website – our platform transforms into a bidirectional dictionary. You can type both English and Spanish words into the search box, and our program will look for the word in both dictionaries and display it in the results list for you to choose it. This principle works for any pair of languages, of which English is one.

The Russian, Spanish, French, and German versions of the website offer the same capability.

3) Additional sorting capabilities. We also got requests to add more sorting options when it comes to our list of languages. Previously, we offered a distribution by major geographical regions only, and it could be hard to jump quickly to the language you need – there are 100+ different languages in the list! With this update, geographical sorting remains an option, but you can also put the languages into alphabetical order. This will give you a straightforward option to help you get what you need faster.

Note, however, that this option is available only for registered users. You can sign up for a free Basic Account here.

Find out more about different account types and their benefits.

After registering, under the same Basic account you will have an option to open your “Personal” page, click the Dictionary Settings tab, and select only the languages that you really want or need to work with. This can make your list of languages and translations as short and efficient as it needs to be, and the different types of sorting will also be available when working with a shortened list of languages.

Not to “sell the future” or anything, but we’re already working on the next update, in which we will add further improvements relating to sorting, searching, and grouping languages. Not to mention that we also want to add 20 more languages to our list!

4) A new design. The last but definitely not the least improvement we’ve made, is our brand-new Web design.

We’re almost finished redesigning the whole project, with only a few minor pages left for our next update. We hope you’ll enjoy this new look, since we wanted to give you something great in the 2020s. If you want to get some aesthetic enjoyment, check out how our website looks on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.

See you in a couple of months, when we’ll have another set of news for you to enjoy!

The IDL team

We’re pleased to present you with the updated version of IDL. It features many improvements and optimizations – and, of course, new translations – but above all, we’d like to share with you the new user model and types of accounts that you can open on IDL.

Our platform now offers two major account types: Basic and Professional.

The “Basic” account is created by default when you sign up on our website for the first time. Just enter your email address and password, or use your Facebook credentials to log in, and you’ll immediately get access to our basic features:

– Selecting a subset of languages and using flexible sorting and filtering capabilities. You probably don’t need all 100 of the languages that IDL offers!
– Removing banner ads to enjoy faster loading times and a cleaner look for the site.

The “Professional” account integrates you deeper into our community by allowing you to take part in the content review process and the platform’s development. This account upgrade requires you to set a username, which may later be shown beside your contributions and appear in “Top Users” lists, and also to select up to three languages that you speak or write fluently. You’ll then be able to send us corrections and comments for the languages that you selected.

Both the Basic and Professional account types are available to you absolutely free of charge!

We are creating a multi-user platform that will bring together people who love languages and want to contribute to the platform’s development by adding new words, editing translations, recording pronunciations, rating data, and more. If you support this idea and love languages, feel free to sign up!

At the risk of preempting ourselves, we’ll reveal that one of our next steps in the near future will be creating an “Expert” account type. What does this mean, and what is its purpose on the IDL platform? We’ll discuss all of this, and more, in one of our future posts.

Have a great year,
The IDL Team