This map is going to turn us into expert level polyglot beings in a single click and at the stroke of an image
You enter one or two words in the text box (in English, yes), you click on the Translate it! and magic, aka technology, does the rest. On the map to the right, the word translated into each of the official languages of those territories appears over each country. European Word Translator works wonders and delights lovers of languages and etymology.
After this work is James Trimble, currently a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, who in 2014, the date he created the map, was studying computer's science and was learning about data visualization.
“I came to the world of etymological maps through Reddit and thought it could be fun try to automate them so that people could look up any word. I had also been learning Spanish in my spare time, so I put several of my interests together,” Trimble explains to Traveler.es.
Since 2014 he has made some other changes to the European Word Translator and although he initially thought of unpublishing it in 2017, the messages he received asking him to do otherwise have led him to keep it online. “In principle, I am going to leave it online, at least, until the end of 2020 and I hope that much more time”, he counts.
The translations generated by the map are obtained with Google Translate, so on his website he warns that some may be inaccurate and that you have to be careful with polysemous words, since European Word Translator only provides one translation for each word.
Also, he remembers that Google Translate does not translate to all European languages and that if it can't find any translation it just leaves the word in English.
“One of the things I've learned from making this map is that it is very difficult to get etymological maps correct. Many words have more than one meaning and Google Translate does not always give the same meaning in each language. Sadly, I haven't managed to include as many languages as I would have liked either. So you have to keep in mind that This map is a game and not something to lean on." Trimble clarifies.
So let's play friends.
Step one: enter word. Step 2: hit the button. Step 3: See the result