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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 17 of 76 21 February 2011 at 11:04pm | IP Logged |
I personally find that Franker is NOT a dream come true or a wonderful find. Yes. It is ok and it may have its value. But I find it awkward and thus not likely to be used, for the following reasons:
1. The embedded translations, even in a different colour, are very confusing and disruptive.
2. They are not beginning-aligned, so it is hard to find words.
3. Franker requires a cntl-F or other key sequence, rather than double-clicking or highlighting.
4. Google Chrome is required. I am generally a big Google fan, but for a number of reasons, I just don't like Chrome.
I think a much friendlier and useful approach is Firefox with the "Google Dictionary and Google Translate" add-on, together with the Globefish add-on, both at the same time. Use the first one all the time for the single word pop-up dictionary, and the second one as selectable from Tools any time you want to translate a whole sentence. With a little use, they become very useful and unobtrusive. Globefish gives the added advantage of easily and quickly finding Web examples of words or combinations of words in context sentences. At first I didn't use this feature, but it is really good.
You retain the target language text with no distractions until you need a single word or sentence translated. Then you get what you need quickly and unobtrusively, and more. And then get on with your reading.
I'll try Chrome and Franker a bit more, but I really don't think they are nearly as good as the Firefox option.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5670 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 18 of 76 22 February 2011 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
Splog wrote:
What a wonderful find. I wish it were possible to switch the sentence order, so that
the
translation comes before the original text (since I find this much more helpful) but
besides that, it is a marvellous plug-in. Thank you so much for finding it and bringing
it to our attention. |
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I contacted the creator of Franker, and suggested that he add an setting to switch the
order of sentences. He very kindly agreed to add this to his upcoming new release. This
will make it very useful for me, particularly the iPad version - since I often read
things on-the-move.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 19 of 76 24 February 2011 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
I'll try Chrome and Franker a bit more, but I really don't think they are nearly as good as the Firefox option. |
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Well, I have tried it a bit more, and I like it a bit better. I changed it to a better colour than the default light green. I also used it to copy and paste to a text file where you can easily arrange it into left-justified parallel text. Unfortunately, Franker is not available for Firefox.
1 person has voted this message useful
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6380 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 20 of 76 24 February 2011 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
bilingual-texts.com is no longer online. I wonder if Marco is planning on resurrecting it.
1 person has voted this message useful
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 21 of 76 24 February 2011 at 2:13pm | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
Iversen wrote:
So now I mostly use Google translate and 'insert as text' |
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EDIT: I think I just figured it out. If you translate a web page, it looks like it is in the target language only, but if you copy and then paste it as plain text, the translation and the original sentences are aligned in pairs.
That is very useful!
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Exactly!
Sorry if my initial description of this trick wasn't clear: you do the translation, copy the translated page with CTRL C and put it into Word with CTRL V, and in the small menu that pops up below the inserted text you choose "as text". That's all.
However now I'm at it I would like to mention a couple of minor problems:
1) The first sentence in the original language may not always follow the rest, so either you mark a few letters above the passage you are interested in or you can copy the original sentence from the dialog box that pops up when you hover about a sentence in the translation.
2) Full stops after numbers or abbreviations will fool the sentence separation analyser. This means that the initial part of the translation of a sentence turns up in the middle of the original sentence. OK, you then have to move it manually. Irritating, but possible.
3) You have to color the translations by hand - there is no way of marking them automatically. However it makes the use of the sheets much more userfriendly if the languages have different colors.
But in general this method is easy, and I have made quite a lot of printouts using this method. I use these prints in situations where it would be too cumbersome to use a dictionary for lookups, for instance in busses, even for languages which I almost can read without a dictionary, but where a helping hand sometimes might be practical. As I have written elsewhere it is less of a problem than you might think that the translations are of variable quality - you use them to corroborate or to refute your own hypotheses rather than to give you the whole meaning on a platter.
Edited by Iversen on 24 February 2011 at 2:23pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
| JPike1028 Triglot Senior Member United States piketransitions Joined 5398 days ago 297 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Portuguese, Czech
| Message 24 of 76 02 March 2011 at 6:25am | IP Logged |
newyorkeric wrote:
bilingual-texts.com is no longer online. I wonder if Marco is planning on resurrecting
it. |
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That's bizarre, it was just there a couple of weeks ago when I posted about because I checked to make sure I had
the right URL. I hope he resurrects it.
1 person has voted this message useful
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