Foreign Dispatch: Ideas from code editors applied to foreign language writing(harry.vangberg.name) |
Foreign Dispatch: Ideas from code editors applied to foreign language writing(harry.vangberg.name) |
[1] https://lilt.com/technology/translate [2] https://lilt.com/research [3] https://transmart.qq.com/ [4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.13072.pdf
From a maintenance perspective, it's a superpower.
Dictionary entries are complex things. (Well, often they aren't, but they should be. The amount of information one dictionary entry needs to provide is quite large.) I don't see a lot of value in having the editor pop up abbreviated dictionary entries for words that I know I need to look up. If I know that, I can look up the word in a high-quality dictionary and benefit from a much fuller entry.
Something can be done here. Books with aligned/inlined/popup translations, tracking known/unknown vocabulary, spaced repetition for new words.
I'm what people in the Midwest [1] call "good with languages" in that I have learned a host of them to intermediate level, and then run aground on getting to advanced, which I think of as the ability to express yourself colloquially and elegantly on any random topic. An IDE like we're talking about would be a godsend, not least because it would speed things up between ten and a hundred-fold.
Argh, I'm tempted to quit my fucking job and try to make this exist, though I'm not qualified to build it. Maybe someone else will do something comparable -- definitely a "take my money" example :)
[1] I mention being from the Midwest bc, when I was growing up, average small-town people lacked any real access or exposure to (or motivation to acquire) other languages. When I got old enough to travel (also not a thing generally done in my social setting), running into people fluent in 4 languages just by accident of birth, would always make me so jealous :/
Foreign Dispatch looks to eventually be an ensemble of tools. Autocomplete being the first, with one-for-one analogs of programming: linter, in-line documentation, and language server.
Going back to your writing concept, how cool would it be to pop up snippets of German literature for similar sentences in context? That would be neat.
If this is your standard, then to within rounding error, 0% of people have reached an "advanced" level in their own native language(s). Elegance is difficult.
(Though some people do seem to believe in a similar standard. My sister grew up in the United States, in an exclusively English-speaking household, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the state department and took their English ability test (I assume for fun). She scored less than fluent - according to the rubric, not qualified to talk to Anglophone college graduates.
I can attest personally that college graduates don't seem to mind if you, as a foreigner, don't know the specialized vocabulary they learned in college.)