Sciolism Rocks

I’ve blogged about Google’s translation service before, but not specifically about their (translation) dictionary. They’ve released a new version that is improved: many more words, with improved readability.

But they suffer from a fatal flaw. Examine the definition of feutre, a noun, below:

If you know anything about French, you know that the devil is in the genders. Can you tell the gender of feutre here ? Both stylo and chapeau are masculine, but that doesn’t tell you anything about this word. What about the oft-repeated rule that words that end in -e are feminine?

The context that I find the word is in Christine ANGOT, Vu du ciel : « Sur le torse blanc de Célline, je t’aime au feutre rouge. » So it’s clear from the context that feutre is masculine, but I shouldn’t need context when I’m using a dictionary.

With the addition of genders and a little toleration with word endings (bandleroles turns up nothing, but its singular, bandlerole gives me what I want), this will become quite the tool.

For the record, my favorite online French-French dictionary is illustrated here. For French-English, I prefer this one when it gets the words right, but am sometimes forced to use this one because of its toleration for misspellings and conjugated verbs.