Language tools – a quick revisit

Language tools – a quick revisit

Awhile back Natalia pushed me out of the nest, saying it was finally time for me to start writing to her in Spanish. For years we have been writing back and forth bilingually, my e-mails in English, hers in Spanish. Which was super pleasant. But it was laziness on my part, and in fact unbecoming of a person whose goal is to do business in Latin America.

Writing in Spanish was hard for me at first but it’s getting easier with practice. I read well, but speak poorly, and I had zero experience with writing. To my surprise though, just having everyday language tools readily at hand makes it much, much easier now than it would have been, say, 5 years ago. It isn’t cheating to use these things. In fact writing simple e-mails with the support of spell-checkers and grammar-checkers, conjugators and dictionaries, and of course machine translation, is just a great way to get continual correcting feedback while learning any language.

Over the years I’ve written several posts about language learning and language tools, so today I decided to make a new category called Language – it’s apparently a theme on this blog. If you click Language on the sidebar, you’ll see some of these prior posts. Always they have a special focus on free or nearly-free computer applications. I just finished sending an e-mail to Natalia and I thought it might be worth describing the tools I like best for anybody else who’s struggling with a second language. With almost no modification, these ideas will work in any mainstream language. For example they would work great in the opposite direction, i.e. for a native speaker of Spanish who wants to write in English.

Normally (like right now) I write without a keyboard, dictating into Dragon. But of course I use a keyboard for Spanish; it’s basically the only time I actually type. So to write a Spanish e-mail I attach a keyboard and open a blank document in Word. I don’t use any special Spanish template, just the default blank page. I have the status bar displayed at the bottom, and it starts off showing "English (U.S.)." Usually though, if I type just a few sentences, it figures out I’m talking in Spanish and switches by itself to "Spanish (Argentina)." If it doesn’t, I can just control-A to select what I’ve written so far, click Review, and set the proofing language manually. As soon as things are flying straight, I save the little document as a dated temporary scratch file under Transrio\Spanish\Writings.

I don’t want to come off overly Windows-centric. But frankly (and depending on your view perhaps, unfortunately) I doubt there’s a better program than Word for writing in foreign languages. If you read my last post about language learning, you’ll see that out-of-the-box Word can be driven in a whole slew of crazy directions, linguistically. If you haven’t had time to explore what’s available there, prepare to be amazed by the depth, width, and quality of the language tools right within Word. For this reason it goes without saying that I compose in Word until I’m 100% done, and only then lift the finished text into e-mail, HTML, or whatever else I’m going to use it for.

While actually writing, the tools I use most are:

  • A good bilingual dictionary (Oxford in my case) for finding words when I’m drawing a blank. And also, equally useful, the right-click synonym-thesaurus feature within Word.
  • Google & Bing translate, opened in a browser and set for English-to-Spanish, to give me a boost with short phrases. I can type a few words into them in English, and they usually return some pretty decent Spanish for me to work into my writing. Often that’s faster than the dictionary.
  • An online verb conjugator. My favorite for Spanish is Onoma because it gives the Vos forms necessary in Argentina. I use the Analyze tab for deciphering obscure verb forms, and the Conjugate tab for straightforward conjugation. Depending on your language, you definitely need to find an online conjugator you like. Another truly fine conjugator in Spanish is SpanishDict. Really I use the two of them interchangeably.

I know it sounds like an awful lot of crap to have up & running for a simple e-mail. In practice, though, none of this gets in the way, it simply helps. I type along freely, not worrying much about mistakes, until I hit a little sticky spot. Then I go to whichever tool is going to get me unstuck the quickest.

When all done writing, I proof normally. This is where my relative fluency in reading serves me well. If what I wrote doesn’t read well, I can often see it. Then I spell-check and grammar-check the whole thing in Word. That’s a one-click process. This usually rounds up the little rogues and strays, while at the same time teaching me a few new things about the language.

For the coup de grace, I control-A-control-C and paste my completed masterpiece into both Google & Bing, now set for Spanish-to-English, like this:

Screenshot, Bing translate

If the reverse translation reads clean, great. More often it trips in a couple places, and immediately I recognize why, and can see there’s a more straightforward way to say things. Any corrections that I think up, I make them in the original Word version, then copy-and-paste again to run it through MT one more time.

A quick and final spellcheck, then I lift the finished thing into e-mail, and format for mailing.

Squiggle

So that’s how I like to write these days. And in my May post I described a method of study whereby you can read super-interesting articles with the support of Word’s mini-translator and TTS, text-to-speech. I’m still doing that, generally 15 minutes each morning, and I really have nothing to add to that original article. The method works great, I love it. I feel like I’m learning quickly.

Perhaps there is one little thing of interest. I’ve found by experience that present-day statistical MT like Google & Bing is, surprisingly often, superior to the best dictionary. For example, if you are reading and you stumble on an important word that you just can’t gist, and you check the dictionary, and either the word doesn’t exist or the definition makes no sense… then paste the whole paragraph containing that word into either of these modern statistical MT engines. If you are using Word’s mini-translator, this is as simple as highlighting the passage and hovering over it.

Two things commonly happen. First, it may be a new word or regional word or slang word which hasn’t made it into the dictionary. But if it’s floating around on the Internet, Google or Bing will often be able to fetch recent parallel text from its store and convert the word correctly. Or secondly, you might be looking at an uncommon meaning for a relatively common word. For example in English (I’m looking out the window at a tree) there are boot trees, leaves for a dining room table, gold leaf, a dog’s bark, a bank’s branch, tree structures, etc. You might know full well what a tree is, but have no foggy clue what a boot tree is. Yet statistical machine translation, because of the way it works, will look at "boot tree" as a connected expression in the context of the full paragraph, and often translate it mindlessly into the exact Spanish equivalent. Whatever that is. If they even use boot trees.

Remember, this isn’t magic. At its foundation it’s like any other search, a highly polished machine algorithm combing parallel text like a spider, text which was originally translated by top-notch human professionals. This is why it keeps up automatically with the leading edge of the evolving language, and also why it can translate words accurately using the surrounding context of the paragraph, while a dictionary can’t.

Just yesterday while reading an article I ran across this sentence, which I thought I understood but wasn’t sure. So, curious, I pasted it into Google:

Screenshot from Google Translate

I was unfamiliar with the words fueres and vieres, although I guessed correctly they were exotic or old-fashioned conjugations of ir and ver – "to go" and "to see." As it turns out, Onoma identifies them as future subjunctive, an uncommon tense. So the phrase “donde fueres haz lo que vieres” means – Pete’s translation – "wherever you might go, do what you see there." As you can see, Google gave an ELEGANT translation, and one which would be completely out of reach to any rule-based engine. In fact, it mimicked a human’s understanding of the two cultures.

– Pete

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