I have imported e-book content and found that the dictionary is not as efficient as content that is not imported. This is more profound when highlighting a number of words. Is there a reason this is occuring?
More common words are likely to have many people adding and modifying translations for them, and effectively up-voting good translations by lingqing them. If you find that the words in your ebook have worse or less exhaustive translations, it’s probably just because they’re rarer words. Some rare words have no translations at all, because no one has added one yet.
Phrases are more likely to get a user-contributed translation if they occur in well-read shared material. I think if you highlight a phrase which hasn’t been lingqed yet, you just get a machine translation.
Thank you for your answer.
So the problem is LingQ is difficult to find content using the filters so I import content privately and the dictionaries and phrases are not working efficiently. Would the system not recognise such a phrase as “on avais le temps” It should be picked up being common?
Where do i go from here.
Looks like my dictionary changed to french, i changed to english and it seems to have improved the issue. 
That makes sense, if your study and dictionary language were same, you can’t get translation for selected words. I am glad to hear you figured it out!
I had the same problem recently. My dictionary language changed to English, and I’ve no idea how this happened. I changed it back to German, and the dictionary worked again. Is there probably a short key that changes the language, so this could happen accidentally?