FAQ

This is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions I have received from users about SynchroTales:

Does SynchroTales collect my personal data?

No. Out of respect for users' privacy, SynchroTales doesn't persist any data about its users. We do collect general telemetry data about what features of the software are being used to inform the development lifecycle.

Why is there no material available through SynchroTales for my preferred language pair?

All books and audio files provided through SynchroTales.com are sourced from the public domain. The requirements for a particular work to be included are:

  • It must be translated into multiple languages (preferably by a human)
  • All included text must be in the public domain, or SynchroTales must otherwise have permission to use and distribute it
  • It must have associated audio for multiple languages (again, preferably spoken by a real person)
  • Included audio must be part of the public domain, or SynchroTales must otherwise have permission to use and distribute it

These criteria rule out the vast majority of works, and limits the number of languages that can be provided. The good news is that, so long as fonts exist to display your desired language, it is probably supported by the software already! You may be able to help bring material in your language to SynchroTales, see: Editor.

Why are so many definitions missing for my preferred language pair?

The dictionaries provided by SynchroTales are built using user-contributed definitions available from wiktionary.org. There are a couple reasons why a particular word may not be defined in a particular language:

  1. A definition has not been contributed to the respective Wiktionary: you may be able to help with this by contributing a definition to the corresponding wiktionary!
  2. The definition is not being parsed properly from Wiktionary data:
    • the Wiktionary project is designed to crowd-source human readable definitions, and while often groups of contributors have converged on some consistent formatting which allows definitions to be processed by a computer and converted to a different format such as that used by SynchroTales, this is not always the case and many exceptions exist! To make matters worse, Wiktionaries for different languages generally do not use the same patterns. If you notice that words in a particular language are consistently present on Wiktionary, but absent from the SynchroTales dictionaries, let us know and we will see if they can be added: support@synchrotales.com

Can I change the interface language?

Not yet, but localization is high on my list of TODOs for SynchroTales, so you should be able to soon.