Already at five million downloads, the popular European translation app updates its technology which now includes an improved UI and educational resources for language learners Chances are, if you’ve ever spoken to someone whose native language differs from yours, you’ve had a misunderstanding while communicating with them. Whether or not you misunderstood them, or if it was yourself who was misunderstood, you have to wonder: What led to it? There are dozens of barriers to communication that might lead to a misunderstanding, things like accents, one’s interpretation of language, faulty definitions, or everyday colloquialisms that can create a slippery slope once translated into a different language. One app hopes to rid the world of such miscommunications through its use of machine learning and artificial intelligence that gives context to words and phrases with double meanings. Reverso recently launched ‘Reverso Context 6.0,’ which has an improved UI, more accurate speak-to-translate technology, and pronunciation from native speakers in 12 languages.
The app’s best feature, and the reason the company calls it “Reverso Context,” is the translation setting itself. Reverso gives users “in context” translations through popular film, television quotes, and official documents. Version 6.0 also lets users save/annotate and share translations with friends, and includes a host of other educational resources like flashcards, language-related quizzes and statistics/charts to track progress. So, putting things into context, (yes, pun intended) Reverso’s technology is simple at its core and saves words to the user’s history allowing them to return to previously searched and annotated words for further practice.
Diving deeper into the platform, my goal was to understand just how the technology could take words and phrases that didn’t even make sense to me, and make sense of them for non-native speakers. I soon discovered that Reverso context was not your mother’s translation app. I first searched “case and point,” a phrase that even for a native English speaker, leaves room for misinterpretation, and next looked for “honed in on.” Here are the results from my attempt at using Reverso to clear up the phrases’ murky meanings: “There’s a saying, ‘Every man is put on Earth condemned to die, time and method of execution unknown.’ Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point: Walter Bedeker, lately deceased, a little man with such a yen to live. Beaten by the Devil, by his own boredom, and by the scheme of things in this” – quoted from a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone. I then searched “honed in on,” and got the following result: “Hippies with a finely honed sense of irony,” again, yet another way of Reverso’s technology utilizing popular film and television shows, with this clarifying example coming from “Greek.” What Reverso does is nothing short amazing, and what it’s capable of doing is no simple feat. There are however a few disadvantages of the platform. Currently, the app only supports Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian, whereas other, more popular translation apps and websites like Google, support more than 90 languages. Where the app truly excels is in its namesake — providing contextualized support for words and phrases through palatable, understandable sentences.
