The translations of new vocabularies are horrible

When I learn spanish on this website I click on the new words to see their translations in Chinese, but many of them are so ridiculous! Like for the word “qui”, it even gave me an archaic translation that is only used in very formal and official documents. And the word “avion” is translated as “the engine” and I was so confused about the sentence that someone is taking an engine to go somewhere. I hope someone could recommend a good dictionary because the website translation is not helping (at least me) at all.

I’m not surprised that you saw ‘engine’ on LingQ, since ‘engine’ or ‘machine’ form part of the 飞机 characters, which of course you know.

When I typed in your Spanish “avión” into Google Translate < https://translate.google.com/ > , I was given meanings of plane, aircraft, ship etc. in English. [I always keep Google Translate open on a separate tab/window, rather than using LingQ’s popup] Often there are several definitions given underneath the main translation, which can help you decide whether to keep the popular LingQ translation, or to improve on it.

However, when I chose Chinese translation, I ended up with 平面 for ‘plane’ - haha!: it seems to be referring to the plane of flat surfaces (judging by the characters), rather than aircraft! So I guess you’d have to decide from the context your Spanish word was used in (paste whole sentence or phrase into Google Trans to get a rough idea of meaning).

Your English appears to be very competent, so maybe use both Chinese and English definitions.

By the way, I thought qui was a French word; Spanish Translate doesn’t seem to recognise it. Perhaps qui really has an archaic use only in Spanish? Or was it que? Just guessing.

Hi! The hints you see in the blue pane when clicking on a blue word are user hints - these are the most popular hints that other users have added for this word. If you don’t like any of these hints, just click on “Search dictionary” and you will be able to access a large number of dictionaries that have been integrated into LingQ.

If you have any other questions on this please let us know!