Workaround in order to use Lingq for non-supported language?

Hi Lingq team! (I’m sorry if this is the wrong forum, could you direct me to right place?)

I’m new to Lingq, even though I was following Steve’s videos for years on and off. It’s a truly great system, I really love it! However, one of the reasons I didn’t sign up earlier was that Lingq didn’t support the language that I wanted to learn the most. I would love to use the capacity of Lingq also for languages that are not supported, specifically Latvian. I am aware that there needs to be a certain amount of content to start a language officially (and I cannot see this happening for Latvian anytime soon), but what I am thinking about is a simple workaround which would allow us to import material in any language of interest, have the dictionary function available, and be able to create Lingqs. The idea came from an old video of Steve, where he mentions that he did this when learning Ukrainian, I believe. He simply imported Ukrainian material into the Hebrew slot of Lingq, exploiting the fact that google translate recognises languages fairly well. So I also tried to import a text in Latvian into the french Lingq; disappointingly, this did not seem to work for me, as google translate seems to be manually set to the language specifed by the system. Is there any workaround for this? If not, there might be some easy way to improve the system. For example: if there was the option of turning off automatic language recognition in google translate! Or if we could add our own dictionary!? Or if there was a slot for “any language” where google translate is not set to a specific language. It seems like such a silly issue, on which, however, completely depends whether Lingq is useful for any languages or just the official ones. I understand that you would not want to promote using Lingq for a non-supported language, but surely it would be a very nice feature for everyone who is already an adept, and greatly enlarge the scope of Lingq!

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I think there are issues with this since we share Hints and a few other problems.
However, I would like to report that a person contacted me offering to translate and record our mini-stories into Latvian. I will follow up to see what happened.
I am hoping that we can reach a threshold of some number of stories in any given language that would justify putting a language into Beta, and then a second threshold to make the languages supported. We will see how it goes.
In any case, if that person produces some of these stories in Latvian, that may help you. Anyone involved in the translation/recording of these stories will have access to all the files as they develop. Perhaps you could also help out with the German? Zoran is in charge of the project.

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Hi Steve! Thanks a lot for your answer. It’s great to hear that there is some chance Latvian might actually happen! I would definitely like to stay updated on how that is going. I am sure the stories would be of great help, and I would definitely use them! But simply being able to use google translate and collect Lingqs in Latvian would already be nice. (Google translate has a browser extension which allows you to double click on a word and see the translation. It works perfectly, but I cannot create Lingqs that way. Yet if I import the text into Lingq, the extension doesnt work anymore.) I can see the issue with sharing hints, but I would guess that creating an extra slot for “any language” should easily circumvent that problem, if we just have a little bit of tolerance for bad hints in this slot.
In any case, I can sure help translating a couple of stories into German, although I am not sure I have the means to record them in good quality. I will let Zoran know.