About

Hello! My name's Mike. Thanks for checking out our About page. Here's the story: The Great Translation Game all started as I was learning Spanish and trying to prep for the writing portion of the DELE C1, a Spanish proficiency exam.

Trying to improve my writing skills in Spanish was a pain. 😧 I'd try writing on my own, something like a language journal, but I was never sure if what I was writing was correct or made sense. Sure I'd use a dictionary and look up examples sentences, but is this really what a native speaker would write? Not sure.

I really liked Lang-8 - a service where you'd write something in the language you're learning then other people in the community would submit corrections. But I'd submit a text and would have to wait days for corrections, and even then I was never sure of the quality of the corrections. Were these coming from a native speaker, or another learner like myself? No idea.

I really liked Duolingo's immersion feature which let you practice translating texts collaboratively, but I was translating from Spanish into English - it wasn't helping at all with my ability to write in Spanish.

Our other product 👉 Clozemaster 👈 is awesome, though only offers one missing word per sentence. Great when starting out, but I was looking for more of a challenge at this point.

Getting tutors and native speakers to correct my writing is clearly the way to go. But that can get expensive. 💰 And there too there's a delay between questions that come up as I'm writing and when I'd get the corrections. By the time I'd get the corrections I'd forget why I wrote what I did. Expensive and not ideal.

So I started simply writing out, copying, texts that I read in Spanish. I'd rewrite entire news articles, sometimes multiple times. This was incredibly helpful - I was learning new vocab, getting in the habit of writing as a native speaker would. But it was slow and quickly grew to be disorganized - I needed a way to track what'd I worked through, and better yet keep track of particularly challenging phrases and sntences to review later. Additionally, while useful, it was also a bit boring.

And all that is what lead to the development of 🎉

You can import texts and not only copy but actively attempt to translate. You get immediate feedback. It's fun. It's challenging. You can track the number of words and sentences you've written. You can save challenging sentences, add notes, and review them later. You can save individual words and phrases and review those later too. You can use news articles, blog posts, Wikipedia articles, and create texts from Tatoeba sentences to practice a specific set of words or grammatical topic. It's the best resource to improve your writing, vocab, and production skills in another language.

My ability to write in Spanish has improved drastically. And what's more is that all the low-stress practice producing Spanish has improved my confidence level while speaking in Spanish, not to mention all the improvements in vocab and grammar. And probably what's most important is that it's helped me keep up my motivation - it's fun translating sentences and making progress.

I hope you find The Great Translation Game as useful as I do. If you don't, let me know. The team and I are always working to make it better. 🙂

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