BGreco Senior Member Joined 6395 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 1 of 130 27 May 2008 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
Since the other thread diverged from the author's purpose, I thought I'd start a new thread.
Here's the basic idea copied from my post in the other thread.
"We could make a basic Assimil-like course online with English and another language. The same dialogues could be translated into many languages, and all be recorded by the native speaker performing the translation. Since it would all be the same dialogues, you could use any language available as a base to use any of the other languages."
The starting block would be to write an initial course in English (which would just be a set of English dialogues). I would be more than willing to do this and record it.
Then, others who are bilingual could write these same dialogues in their own language and record it. The idea is that once some makes, for example, a French and Russian translation, you could not only learn French through English, but you could learn it through Russian, too.
If anyone has interest in collaborating in this effort, I think it is very feasible and not an unreasonable amount of work (knowing how much time some of us spend on this forum). Please post or PM what you would be willing to contribute so that I can figure out if we can make this happen.
This would be fulfilling what I believe Professor Arguelles called "A Polyglot's Dream."
Edited by BGreco on 27 May 2008 at 11:28pm
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6379 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 130 28 May 2008 at 12:29am | IP Logged |
While I can understand the usefulness of this type of project for aspiring polyglots, I wonder if it mightn't be better use of time and resources to simply translate the existing Assimil courses from French into English. After all, not everyone has either the time or the inclination to learn French simply to use the many French-based Assimil courses.
I don't know how much of a copyright issue there would be to simply translate each lesson's dialogs into English, but doing so could only help Assimil sales, as learners would still have to buy the product in order to obtain the native text and audio.
Edited by sheetz on 28 May 2008 at 12:34am
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BGreco Senior Member Joined 6395 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 3 of 130 28 May 2008 at 12:34am | IP Logged |
I'm pretty sure that would be a big copyright infringement. Imagine if I released a translated version of Harry Potter without giving J.K. Rowling any of the money. This way, there would be no legal problems, it would be cheaper, and it would be the same amount of work (minus creating the initial course, which I am willing to do).
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6379 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 4 of 130 28 May 2008 at 12:45am | IP Logged |
It's not the same thing as translating an entire book, however. Having a copy of only the translated dialogs would be useless because you'd still have to buy the course to get the native texts and the audios.
It's really nowhere near the same amount of work.
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BGreco Senior Member Joined 6395 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 6 of 130 28 May 2008 at 1:00am | IP Logged |
sheetz wrote:
It's not the same thing as translating an entire book, however. Having a copy of only the translated dialogs would be useless because you'd still have to buy the course to get the native texts and the audios.
It's really nowhere near the same amount of work. |
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I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere. With this, there would be mp3 files of the native audio and you would have the text in both your L1 and target language. There would be no need to buy anything.
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6379 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 7 of 130 28 May 2008 at 1:05am | IP Logged |
BGreco wrote:
sheetz wrote:
It's not the same thing as translating an entire book, however. Having a copy of only the translated dialogs would be useless because you'd still have to buy the course to get the native texts and the audios.
It's really nowhere near the same amount of work. |
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I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere. With this, there would be mp3 files of the native audio and you would have the text in both your L1 and target language. There would be no need to buy anything. |
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I'm talking about a translation of the Assimil dialogs. What I'm saying is that having a copy of the translated Assimil dialogs would in no way negatively affect sales of the French based Assimil product, and in fact would most certainly help it. Your example of translating Harry Potter is different because a translation would definitely hurt sales of the official translations.
Edited by sheetz on 28 May 2008 at 1:09am
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Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6896 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 8 of 130 28 May 2008 at 1:40am | IP Logged |
sheetz wrote:
What I'm saying is that having a copy of the translated Assimil dialogs would in no way negatively affect sales of the French based Assimil product, and in fact would most certainly help it. |
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Whether they affect sales or not, and in what direction, would be hard to prove, and is irrelevant anyway from the legal point of view. It would be a copyright infringement all the same.
EDIT: But you could always request permission from Assimil.
Edited by Hencke on 28 May 2008 at 2:31am
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