English-Spanish lookup now recognises more inflections

Improvements have been made to the site's English-Spanish dictionary to make it recognise more English inflections. In particular:

• most irregular English verb forms are now recognised
• many plural forms are also recognised where they weren't previously.

Continuing improvements are being made to the dictionary's handling of inflected word forms. The improvements that are being made are based on an analysis of failed lookups. Future work will include not only matching an inflected word form to its base word, but also helping the user to translate that inflected word into the other language. Watch this blog for more news!

Spanish dictionary update

The latest update to the English-Spanish dictionary includes translations for around 8,000 additional words, including a number of translations from Sofronio Calderón's 1915 Spanish-English-Tagalog dictionary (now out of copyright).

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.

Dictionary update

Various updates have been made to the Spanish Dictionary, including the addition of new words.

Dictionary update and methodology

The Spanish dictionary has been updated.

For those interested, a couple of pages of information are available explaining the methodology used in compiling the Spanish-English dictionary.