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