This morning my girlfriend looked up a word in the dictionary and couldn’t find it (it was a small pocket dictionary). It made me think about what would’ve happened if she had one of those electronic translators.

By using a book she found other words while looking for something else and she might just remember those in the future. She learned something new even-though she couldn’t find what she was looking for. A nice side effect when trying to learn a language.

With an electronic translator you usually only get something like “no result” or if you’re lucky you get “did you mean XXXXX?”. Thanks to search functions you don’t usually have to browse for what you need. Of course it’s a lot more likely to find what you’re looking for if you’re using an electronic device but I’d love to see search results that also give you the previous and next entries (not just the related ones) and let you browse near a word instead of only giving the 100% relevant result.