Lingro's Growing!

Come check out all the new tools, dictionaries, and translations of Lingro’s pages!

Since our launch, we've received a lot of amazing feedback and requests from you, our users. We've been hard at work adding tools you've asked for, fixing problems you've found, and adding new dictionaries you've requested. Here's a run-down of everything new you'll be able to see on the site:

Lingro in your language

Users have been coming to Lingro from around the world, especially from the U.S. and Europe. To make the site easier to use and accessible by more people, we've added translations of Lingro's pages into German, Polish, French, Spanish, and Italian! To set the language you see Lingro in, click "preferences" on the right side of the toolbar at the bottom.

If you speak German or Polish, you can also use http://lingro.de or http://lingro.pl for quick access to Lingro in your language.

Review sentences you've read

It's a fact - learning new words in context not only helps you remember vocabulary, but helps you develop a deeper understanding of their meaning. You've been able to look up words in context with the web viewer and file viewer - now you can review words in context too! The sentence history page lets you see all the sites you've read with Lingro, along with the words you've clicked on and the sentences those words were in. Try coming back to your Sentence History a few hours after you've read a page and see how many words you remember.

Tools for webmasters

Do you have a blog or a website with international readers? Here are some great ways to give these readers a hand, without having your writing lost in translation with Babel Fish or Google Translator. You'll also be showing your support for open, community-developed dictionaries!

• Lingro Badge

By putting the Lingro Badge in the sidebar of your blog or on your website, you'll let your readers open your page in the web viewer with a single click! Multilingual readers will be able to read your website much more easily since they can look up new words with a single click. They'll also be spending more time on your site, which is great for you if you're supported by ads.

You can try it out right now on our blog - you should see the badge on the right.

• Contributor

Are you as enthusiastic about open-content as we are? We designed the contributor along with our friends at Worldwide Lexicon (check out their site if you haven't already!) to let your readers contribute translations missing from the Lingro dictionaries. The contributor figures out which language a reader uses on their computer, and prompts them with words from a second language to translate.

Check it out on the bottom of our blog.

• API

The Lingro API gives you a way to invisibly add Lingro translation bubble capability to your page. Just add one line of HTML code and set the class of any element on your page to "lingro_container" to let users click on words inside for instant translations. This is especially useful for sites with interactive multilingual content (such as language-learning social networking sites) where users will frequently encounter words they are unfamiliar with.

Help build dictionaries

Lots of people have been asking us, "How can I help build the dictionaries?" Here's our answer: the dictionary builder. In a nutshell, it shows you words missing from Lingro's dictionaries, and lets you enter translations and definitions for these words. It even shows you a few sentences which use these words to help you get an idea of their meaning. The missing words shown to you are ordered by how commonly they occur in the language, so you can be sure that your time is spent working on something meaningful. Everything you contribute will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license and the GNU Free Documentation license so that your work is made free and open to the world!

Stay informed

As you can see, we've started a blog! You'll be able to check here for all the latest Lingro news on new tools and dictionaries, and maybe even some thoughts on language and linguistics from Lingro's creators.

Last but not least, improved dictionaries (including Swedish!)

A lot of you asked for Swedish translations. We heard you - Lingro now has Swedish dictionaries! They're still relatively small, but with your help, they'll grow! If you know of anyone fluent in Swedish and another language on Lingro, point them towards the dictionary builder. :-)

Since we're asking you to contribute translations, it's only fair that we should also be doing our part to keep the dictionaries growing. We've been hard at work searching for more open dictionaries to add to Lingro's existing languages. You should notice fewer missing words in most of the dictionaries on Lingro, as well as a huge improvement in the Polish dictionaries. Check out our redesigned statistics page for all the details.

We just wanted to say another giant thank-you to everyone who's tried the site out, and especially to all the people who have blogged about us and sent us feedback. If you ever have any suggestions for Lingro, please don't hesitate to shoot us an e-mail at feedback@lingro.com, or post a comment here.

Peace,
The Lingro Team