Activity on the French forum

Lots of interesting questions (and answers!) on the French forum today and yesterday -- keep it up!

Promo codes for French Vocab Games app

Thank you to all those who have registered for a free promo code for the French Vocab Games app for iPhone/iPad. I have had more registrations than available codes and so will be allocating available codes at random of the next couple of days.

If you are still interested in a code, then you are just about in time to register!

Links to translation articles

On the home page of the site's translation service, I've added links to various translation-related articles I've written that may be of interest to readers. In particular, you may be interested in my article on What makes a good translation?, where I set out some of the reasons why translation is not in fact the trivial, mechanical process that it is typically thought to constitute.

Performance update on French Linguistics site

After Monday's performance issues, the site now appears to be functioning normally, with 92% of requests turned round with approx 500ms and 81% of requests within approx 200ms.

A very small number of clients appear to be experiencing delays in accessing the site that are likely due to local issues.

Performance problems being investigated

The French dictionary and various other pages on the site were unavailable from 1:30am GMT due to a database performance problem which is being investigated.

Update: I've been informed that there was a general I/O problem on the server running the site and that this problem has now been resolved. I am therefore expecting the site to run normally from now on, but will be monitoring the situation. Thank you for your patience.

Planned updates to automatic translation service

Some improvements are planned for the automatic French translator provided for free on the French Linguistics site. These changes include:

• improvements to the translations provided;
• improvements to the "SMS decoder" function that is built into the translator;
• improvements to additional information provided alongside translations.

If you have used the translator and have any suggestions/observations, then please feel free to tweet them to @BitterCoffey or add them as a note here.