About Mentor: what Mentor is not and what Mentor is.
Mentor is not an automatic translator nor properly a CAT application. Still it may be very useful to translators, language students and linguists.Mentor is a lexical assistant. What it basically does is reference automatically words to a given dictionary, letting you save a lot of time.
All you have to do is type or paste your text in the text box, chose the language(s) and lexicon(s) from the drop-down list, and press 'Submit'. Mentor will automatically create a reference link for every single word. At this point, click the word you need to look up to instantly consult the related dictionary.
The dictionaries Mentor uses are third party external resources, and are not a part of Mentor itself. Still, they are carefully chosen to provide not only a lexical but also a morphological reference.
Why Mentor?
In the Odyssey, Mentor was a friend of Odysseus in charge of his son Telemachus, while he was at the Trojan war. Because of Mentor's relationship with Telemachus, the personal name Mentor has been adopted in many languages as a term meaning someone giving good advices and suggestions.Actually this is what the Mentor application does: giving lexical advices.
Why a blackbird?
Blackbirds may someway be considered suggesting animals in the European habitat. Actually, making a lot of noise when a danger approaches their nest, they alarm other birds about potential predators.But, most of all, this nice, cheerful and friendly bird is one of my favourite ones. So here it is.
Notes.
Thanks to prof. Bolette Sandford Pedersen (Language Technology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) for indirectly helping me to focus the idea in 2011.Thanks to prof. Arthur Copeland Eschenlauer (Princeton University, USA) for the suggestion on how to improve Mentor usability.
Thanks to my brillant mind for having always new ideas to work on.