Text accentuation tool

A simple text accentuation tool is available on the Español-Inglés site that allows you to add accents to a piece of text where you wouldn't normally be able to type the accents very easily. The tool is particularly aimed at adding accents to Spanish and French text, though various European languages are supported.

The tool uses a similar system to the Spanish translation tool, so that sequences such as the following are converted:

Sequence	Accent
e/	é
e\	è
n~	ñ
c,,	ç

The tool is implemented as a widget that you can embed in your own web page, blog, MySpace page etc. See the accentuator widget home page for more details.

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!

New vocabulary topic: the weather

Finally, find out how to say that it will be raining mainly on the plain, but with sunny intervals late afternoon. Well, almost. The new vocab section on Spanish weather phrases contains various adjectives and phrases useful for describing the weather in Spanish.

As well as simple present tense statements such as it's sunny, the section includes a brief summary of past tense forms of verbs commonly used for describing the weather (for example, if you're saying that the weather was sunny on holiday). A difficulty in Spanish as in many languages is deciding which of the various tenses to use (in particular between the preterite and imperfect). The new weather vocabulary section includse a brief overview of this problem with examples.

New flash card topics

Some new Spanish flash card topics have been added. You can now print your own flash cards on the topics of greetings, sport, computing.

To print the flash cards, you will generally need to print in two runs. First of all, make sure you have "Spanish only" selected as illustrated opposite. After printing the Spanish side of the flash cards, put the printed pages back into your printer the other way round and select "English only". Normally, you shouldn't need to change the order of the pages before putting them through your printer the second time: the flash card printing program will reverse the order of the pages when printing the English words on the back.

Spanish-English dictionary update

The latest update to the Spanish-English dictionary contains various new words and also includes some omissions from the previous update.

A new experimental auto-complete feature has also been added to the Spanish-English side of the dictionary. As you type a Spanish word to lool up, common Spanish words will be suggeste d that begin with the letters you have typed so far. Note that the system currently suggests only fairly common words, not every single Spanish word possible. Generally, only "base" forms (singulars of nouns, infinitives of verbs) are suggested. However, a small number of common inflected forms are also suggested.