The translator has had its biggest update since launch, almost all of it under the hood. It understands more of the English people actually type, reads Elvish back into English far more reliably, and now checks its Sindarin and Quenya against Eldamo, the scholarly lexicon of Tolkien's languages.
Reading Elvish back. Paste Sindarin or Quenya in and you should get English out, not a row of word stems. Verbs in every tense, commands, "to be", possessives and plurals all read back. Of the test sentences we send into Elvish and back again, the share that returns intact went from about two thirds to 95%.
More of the English you type. Commas, contractions like "don't", greetings, questions such as "who is the king?", one-word commands ("come!"), comparisons ("the king is stronger than the elf"), "some elves", "all the stars", "singing is good", and negation in Sindarin all compose now. Quenya can build sentences with 76 of the 132 common verbs the translator recognises, up from 29, and Sindarin with 109, up from 99.
Mistakes the checking turned up. The hobbits were stored under their Westron names; in Sindarin Frodo is now Iorhael and Sam Perhael, the names Tolkien gives them in the King's Letter. "The lord" is i chîr, as Tolkien wrote it, not i hîr. Sindarin verbs form their past the way Tolkien's own examples do (agor "made", onur "ran"), and "go" is his men- rather than a modern coinage whose meaning is "send".
Honest labels. Where Tolkien left no form, the translator still builds one when the rules allow it, but it says so: those words glow blue and are labelled reconstructions. evin "went" is one. Tolkien never wrote the past of men-, so this is the form Eldamo reconstructs from his pattern. It works the other way too: 21 Sindarin verbs that were labelled reconstructions turned out to be Tolkien's own words, and are now marked as his. The Learn Sindarin course was corrected to match.
It is still a composition assistant, not an oracle. Short sentences work best, and anything outside the grammar it knows comes back as a clearly labelled guess. If a translation looks wrong, the Report link under every result is the quickest way to get it fixed.
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