I’m wondering if this is just me or if anyone else is having the same issue. Back a few years ago when I started using LingQ the translations were lightning fast. Selecting a phrase would immediately show the translation for it, and I could click that translation to make a LingQ if I wanted to.
Nowadays, it is so slow that it is quite literally faster for me to select the text in the LingQ popup, and use the DeepL browser extension to translate the text. Often it takes 10-20 seconds for a translation to show up, and it will just spin until it shows up. It completely breaks my immersion with what I am reading.
I have tried changing the setting to use Google Translate, DeepL, ChatGPT, and all of them are equally slow. I started noticing this around the time when the “contextual”/AI definitions started showing up (quite a while ago) I’m not sure if it’s related.
I have also noticed this for the last couple of months. It’s grindingly slow. If it is the AI definitions slowing things down, I would like to have the option to remove these.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had them both disabled for as long as the option has existed - it hasn’t made a difference for me, the translations (particularly for phrases) is still excessively slow.
You’re right. I’ve now played around with it a bit. I unticked the “contextual meanings” box for Words and this worked to stop the buffering for looking up single words in the dictionary. I then unticked the same “contextual meanings” box for LingQs but this has made no difference. The loading times when highlighting more than one word is very slow with buffering.
It probably has to do with the shift to LLM AIs, back in the day it was all machine translations. I personally noticed that the translations in sentence mode would take a while, but if you switch from chatgpt to deepL the sentence mode ones become lightning fast at least if thats any help.
In sentence mode, translations of multiple words are quite slow and often fail entirely (the spinner goes indefinitely), necessitating a click on Google Translate or simply giving up. Situation is the same for both Korean and French, and has been happening to me for weeks now.
I just started using LingQ again after taking a break for a while and I’m having the same problem with Spanish. Looking up individual words is pretty slow buy usually works eventually. Looking up phrases is extremely slow though. I just get the spinning circle, sometimes indefinitely.
It really messes up the reading flow. I’ll highlight a phrase and while I’m waiting for the translation to come up I’ll read everything else on the rest of the page. When I’m ready to move on to the next page it’s still not done. Sometimes I’ll wait for several more minutes and still nothing. If I click on Google Translate under the dictionaries that seems to always work fast, so I usually end up just ignoring the phrase or clicking on Google Translate so I can continue reading.
This is still quite broken, in my experience. AI translations either work, completely fail/time out, or give incorrect/incomplete translations - all three cases roughly with equal frequency.
