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crossword game feedback RRS feed

  • Question

  • Hey, I found out about the crossword game via twitter. 

    I've played it on English - Spanish and Chinese (Simplified) - English: the main thing I'm not figuring out is how to switch the direction of input using the keyboard. I've also tried playing English - Chinese, but it was way too annoying to scan through the entire bucket of characters to find the one I wanted; even input of accented letters in Spanish was baffling, and I gave up and clicked with the mouse.

    Some of the translations are a little wonky ('thy' for ni3, which is mildly anachronistic; 'su' for ni3 men, which I would think would be 'sus'), but I guess that's how you know it's not hand-curated. I'd love it if Latin were available, but then you'd have to avoid http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14163.

    But seriously, this is amazing. Where else can I get a Chinese - Spanish crossword? I think you'll make some weird-pair polyglots on the internet very happy.

    Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:04 PM

Answers

  • Hi Lu,

    thanks a lot for the feedback. You are right that the content is automatically sourced based on machine translation tables.

    The UI is indeed optimized for touch rather than keyboard use.

    We'll look into the terminology aspects, but it can very well happen that sometimes a not-that-current translation is being used.

    Thanks again for sending your comments,
    Chris Wendt
    Microsoft Translator

    Monday, September 8, 2014 11:56 PM