Freelang’s blog

We have finally finished! Every single page of the site has been upgraded to version 4.0, which is now up and running. We hope the site is easier to navigate, as we especially worked on the menus, to make them more user friendly. Our Magazine section has also been redone completely, with new sections offering language games and travel advice.

Renato Figueiredo went on sending us new updates and new dictionaries, and we had to keep them on the back burner while we were finishing the new design. Now it’s raining dictionaries! Yesterday we uploaded 12 new dictionaries, including a Burmese-English dictionary, and many other languages including Kabyle, Igbo, and less known Caucasian languages. Thanks a lot Renato, and keep up the amazing work!

We have almost finished converting the site to version 4.0. We hope you like the new design and the new navigation menus. As far as the coding is concerned, we now speak PHP and CSS. A small step for Freelang, but a giant leap for its webmaster!

Today we reorganized the Link Center, Freelang’s directory of websites. Now all pages dealing with a specific language are redirected to the corresponding page where the Freelang dictionary can be downloaded. For instance, our links to Hindi language websites can now be found on the Hindi dictionary page. So the Link Center only stores the general links, in categories such as Language learning, Dictionaries and translation, etc. There are also general categories for Asian languages, Indian languages, etc. In these categories, you can also find links concerning languages for which we don’t have a dictionary yet, like Khmer or Lao.

Please let us know what you think of the new design. Looking forward to your comments!

Mother’s Day is coming and our partner, Ectaco, is happy to announce discounts of up to $200 on Lingvosoft Suites!

LingvoSoft translation software (over 4500 products for Windows, Pocket PC, Palm, Smartphones) has received many awards as the best software online.

Following a brain surgery operation, a British man woke up speaking with an Irish accent. He had never been to Ireland, so of course it came as a shock for his relatives and friends. After an hour or so, though, his speech was back to normal. This strange phenomenon is known as the Foreign Accent Syndrome. There were several famous cases, like a Norwegian woman in 1941 who began to spoke with a German accent after her head was hurt by a bomb shell. More recently, in 2008, an American woman woke up speaking with a Russian accent after an operation. But the scientists and linguists say that the patients are simply enable to pronounce some sounds, and it makes them sound like they are speaking with a foreign accent. Anyway, don’t go hurting your head just because you want to improve your accent in Spanish! You may wake up with a broken head and a French accent…

I have considered myself a fan of Paul Auster since the time I read The New York Trilogy. I also read and enjoyed The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies, and I was really looking forward to reading Travels in the Scriptorium. A man locked in a room where there are labels for each object, that sounded so… Austerian! But I ended up really disappointed, as I felt I was reading some kind of caricature or parody of Auster by Auster. Even the old anagram trick (Trause for Auster) seemed worn-out. I read a few reviews on the net and most of them are positive, though there are some negative ones too. Anyone else read this book, if so, did you like it?