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.

Finally, our Android mobile application is close to release, and you should see it on the Google Play Market in a few weeks.

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