New Spanish vocabulary topics

Two new vocabulary topics have been added to the Basic Spanish Phrases section of the web site:

• Spanish computer vocabulary: including names of parts of a computer, plus phrases for describing computer-related activity such as checking e-mail, browsing the web etc.
• Making reservations in Spanish: vocabulary related to making a hotel, train reservation etc.

Spanish translation tool

An experimental automatic Spanish-English translation system has been added to the site. Like its French/English cousin, the tool is based on the Google Translate system and incorporates features such as extra orthographical correction, annotations on the resulting translation, and automatic submission of a variant to the translation system if it is detected that an alternative source sentence may give a more accurate translation.

Update to Spanish spellchecker

The algorithm to the Spanish spellchecker has been improved. The spellchecker, built into the Spanish dictionary), is designed to help users find the correct word when they don't know the exact spelling. For example, typing aragante will find the Spanish word arrogante. As mentioned in the technical overview of the spellchecker, the algorithm is particularly designed to take into account spelling difficulties for non-native speakers of Spanish, so will suggest some alternatives (such as p for b or t for d in some cases) in words where native speakers probably would not have a doubt.

The update includes some improvements around how the spellchecker distinguishes between accented and non-accented syllables when suggesting spelling corrections.

Spanish dictionary update

The Español-Inglés site's Spanish Dictionary has been updated. As usual, various new words and expressions have been added based on words searched for by users that were not in the dictionary. A few corrections have also been made.

Because of the methodology used, updates to the Spanish-English dictionary generally apply automatically to the English-Spanish dictionary.

Feedback on individual entries is always welcome via the feedback button at the bottom of the entry. Thank you to everyone who uses the dictionary for your valuable feedback.

DGT glossary available for English-Spanish

DGT glossary entries are also now available for English-Spanish lookups. (See the previous post for more information.)

Dictionary update: DGT glossary beta

This site is now trialling a new feature for the Spanish-English dictionary. Entries in the Spanish-English side now include related entries from the EC's DGT Multilingual Translation Memory. The latter is a set of translated terms extracted from a body of parallel texts produced by the European Union. Many of the entries are translations of technical or legal terms.

At present, approximately 15,000 translated terms from the DGT translation memory are included alongside this site's dictionary. They are clearly attributed under the heading "Terms from the DGT glossary" at the bottom of dictionary entries.

Not all terms from the DGT translation memory are included, since many are repetitious (e.g. translations of scores of similar chapter and article headings, "ARTICLE XX" etc), or are translations of large chunks of text. The filtering process used to select terms to include alongside dictionary entries is ongoing.