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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5561 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 41 of 54 08 December 2010 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
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@TixhiiDon
Spasibo for the reassurance and tips! I was starting to feel a bit of a durashkin whilst macheteing through the dense unergrowth of Master i Margarita and getting nowhere fast. So glad to hear I'm not alone on this one. :) I did initially think I was onto a winner with Harry Potter, but celebrations came to a prompt halt when I discovered that the translations differ so much from the originals as to be almost unrecognisable as the same story in parts (I guess it's what they call literary license). So I'm still searching.... The first task is getting hold of assailable fun novels where the translation aligns well with the original (the more literal the better, I find). The next hurdle is to find a quality matching audiobook with a narrator you like the sound of (or at least don't mind too much). The final issue is then painstakingly constructing, or preferably finding (pure manna from Heaven!), a suitably easy parallel text. Despite thinking that Russian would be a piece of cake when it comes to all the above, so far I'm not having much luck... Edited by Teango on 08 December 2010 at 7:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6362 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 42 of 54 08 December 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged |
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Well, it's not a 'fun' novel. But have you read 1984?
I found an audiobook for 1984 with a great Russian narrator. Listening to her voice was pure joy! Bilingual-texts.com has a parallel text for it as well. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6245 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 43 of 54 08 December 2010 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, M&M is on my list to. I have started making a phrase aligned version of the first chapter (an alternativ to an interlinear one) but it is put on hold right now with the rest of my Russian studying. I am also tempted by 1984 ... but since you read German, why don't you go for Kafka? I think I found bilingual texts of both Das Schloss and Der Prozess over at franklang.ru. The Russian and German texts match pretty well. And you're absolutely right about the Russian Potter ...
Whatever you choose, it will be exciting to follow your progress! Edited by aloysius on 08 December 2010 at 11:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5469 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 44 of 54 08 December 2010 at 10:51pm | IP Logged |
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I think probably the most enjoyable Russian novel I've ever read is Dead Souls by
Gogol. It's utterly hilarious. Quite difficult, but still not as difficult as MiM, I reckon, and what with it being a world classic and all that it's very easy to get hold of translations and audio books and the like. Although I haven't tried it myself, I imagine non-fiction would be even more effective for L&R, in which case allow me to suggest Journey into the Whirlwind (Krutoi Marshrut) by Eugenia Ginzburg. It's an autobiography about the writer's journey through the Gulag in the 1930s and 40s and it's extraordinary. Bit grim though, as you can imagine from the subject matter... What else? Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn is fantastic, as is Anna Karenina (and surprisingly easy). If you like 1984, read the novel that inspired it, "We" by Zamyatin. Dostoevsky is amazing but pretty hard going. Oh, and there is a hilariously kitsch Socialist Realist novel called The Zhurbins, which I have only read in English, but is a real treat if you like all that "Let's Build Socialism Together!" type nonsense. I will now stop droning on about Russian literature. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5561 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 45 of 54 09 December 2010 at 9:37am | IP Logged |
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Otlichnye predlozheniya zdes' - vsem bol'shoe spasibo.
[Excellent ideas here - big thanks to everyone.] I'm in complete concensus with TixhiiDon when it comes to Russian literature - the wealth of captivating stories and portrayal of the human conditon simply leaves me breathless at times. I've read most of these books over the years in English, but it would be a dream come true to read the Russian novels comfortably and independently in the original one day too. Thanks again for the tips people! :) Edited by Teango on 09 December 2010 at 9:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5561 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 46 of 54 09 December 2010 at 11:17am | IP Logged |
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Cyrillic alphabet, rich inflections, shifting stress patterns/pronunciation, and a general lack of lexical transparency (for English speakers anyway) - these I anticipated; the thing that I wasn't so prepared for with Russian at this early stage is word order (or lack of it).
I used to joke about having to save verbs dangling like lemmings on the end of German sentences, but little did I know: this is just Kindergarten compared to trying to align words from literature in parallel columns between Russian and English. Day by day, my respect for other Russian language learners grows and grows. :) Edited by Teango on 09 December 2010 at 11:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5991 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 47 of 54 09 December 2010 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
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With regard to the "painstaking" process of creating parallel texts, which method are you using to create them?
I recently created my first parallel text from ebooks, and I was able to create a usable version in a matter of minutes using the "hunalign" program (and some initial search-and-replace in emacs), and then after tweaking the input suitably, I was able to iron out all the kinks in about 2 hours, resulting in a perfectly sentence-aligned text. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5561 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 48 of 54 09 December 2010 at 8:10pm | IP Logged |
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@doviende
I just use a bunch of regular expressions to align the texts first, followed by a few hours of ironing out all the wrinkles in a line-numbered split-page text editor. Then it all gets imported into a spreadsheet for the finishing touches and printing out. "hunalign" looks really interesting, by the way - thanks for the tip! Combining the Gale-Church algorithm with lexical data is a good approach on the whole. I look forward to having a play later. I imagine the app should work well with languages like Swedish (oh how I miss Swedish word order already... :) ); however I'm not so sure how it'll deal with languages like Russian, where sentence length and order are not always reliable indicators for aligning passages (not to mention all those bizarre insertions and deletions in texts like Harry Potter). I'll be interested to find out. Here's another useful toolkit that I recall has some good scripts for aligning parallel texts. Worth a look sometime. Edited by Teango on 09 December 2010 at 8:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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