Alternative Answers and Dark Theme on Android

Clozemaster Questions, Suggestions, Feedback
#1

Two Android feature requests:

When using the Android app I found a sentence that needed an “alternate answer”. This feature is not supported on Android. Due to the nature of some of the source material it would be very helpful to have this feature. (Sources are often either far too metaphorical, or far to literal, requiring more than one alternative answer to be able to understand what you’re being asked.)

Also:
Support Dark Theme/Night-Mode on Android. Mein augen!

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#2

Hi Josh,

Thanks for your message! Thanks for letting us know you’re interested in something like that. We’re working on a bunch of cool features at the moment, but I’ve opened a ticket with the dev team so we can add it to our to-do list.
If you have any other feature requests or there’s anything else we might do to improve Clozemaster, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks again and happy playing!

Georgiana @Clozemaster

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#3

*meine Augen :flushed: :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback! Both are on the to-do list. We like pushing new features out to the web first as it’s easier to update and gather feedback, so the mobile app tends to lag behind a bit, and in this case a lot.

As far as issues with the source material - is there anything else you think we might do or add to help here? Would being able to take personal notes for each sentence be useful? Being able to edit / add your own translations? Something else? Interested to hear what you think!

#4

Dangit! Well, it’s fitting (and helpful!) that even on the forum I get language skills corrected! -2xp for me. :smiley:

You’re probably right about “personal notes” for solving most of this in the most down-and-dirty way. (That would certainly help! One feature I’d like in that case is the ability to, on a per-note basis, choose whether this note should “appear when translations are visible”, or “only appear after answering”, giving me the ability to create notes that were alternate translations, and also notes that were a reminder to myself about something about this sentence but were too much of a hint to see before answering.)

Depending on how you’re storing the “alternate translations” over the top of the Tatoeba data though, it’s sort of an interesting idea to clean up the feature globally.

Bearing in mind that I haven’t put a ton of thought into this AND that I only have experience in a few languages, the way I see it there’s three cases for alternative answers:

  1. This can be translated in a slightly different way
  2. This can be translated as multiple things
  3. This is metaphor and the “translation” isn’t going to be literal. The words simply won’t match.

== Case 1 ==
Alles ist gut.
Translations:

  • It’s all right.
  • Everything is OK.
  • Everything is fine.
  • All is well.
  • Everything is all right.
  • Everything is alright.

In this case these are all actually the same translation. An “alternative translations” option to show all of these might be nice, but I think it’s more of a drill-down thing. You may not always need to see all of these every time the sentence comes up.

== Case 2 ==

Sie haben Humor.
Translations:

  • You have a sense of humor.
  • They have a sense of humor.

There are actually two unique translations of this. In cases like this I think I’d personally prefer to always see both translations. (In German in this case it’s not critical. I’m having trouble coming up with another more serious example in German, and I have no idea if it would be an issue in other languages.)

== Case 3: ==
Das ist Schnee von gestern.
Translations:

  • That’s water under the bridge.
  • That’s old hat.
  • That’s yesterday’s news.
  • That is old news.

Danach kräht kein Hahn.
Translations:

  • Nobody cares about that.

In these cases none of the “translations” actually translate the words, which is probably preferable as you do want to translate the sense not the words, however it might be nice to have a “show literal translation” hint for when you come across one of these that you don’t understand.

I’ll stop there for now as that’s the basic idea and there’s no point in digging in further if this is a “whew, no, not something we want to do” idea. (In which case, yeah, add personal notes! :wink: )

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#5

Hi Josh! This is super helpful - thanks! I think you’re right that different translations are useful for different sentences. It seems like having 3 variants like you described might be the way to go, we’d just need to come up with some way of making these options available and clear without cluttering the UI or becoming confusing.

Coming up with some way to improve translations is one of our top priorities at the moment, so please know we’re working on it. I’ll post back here in the forum or subreddit once we have some proposals to get further feedback. In the meantime please let me know of course if anything else comes to mind. Personal notes are on the to-do list either way. Thanks again!