Bilingual book project (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

Bilingual book project
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Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

51 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4901 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 49 of 51

12 September 2014 at 5:42pm | IP Logged

Roberto:D wrote:

Hello everyone !
Great project ^^

I found this which could be useful :
http://getparalleltranslations.com/book

A collection of Russian-English parallel novels.

That looks like a sizable collection. I don't speak Russian, but I wouldn't mind adding the
books to my site. Please let me know if they have licensing info on the site. I.e. are the
source texts out of copyright, and are the size owners willing to share their goodies?
1 person has voted this message useful

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4901 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 50 of 51

12 September 2014 at 6:15pm | IP Logged

RadinaM wrote:

Anyway, since I am mainly interested in Danish at the moment, if you have any Danish
translations for the books you are offering, I'd be happy to help with the aligning process
if I can. Let me know! :)

I have one suggestion for the Ebookmaker program: if you could add the option of styling
differently the two sentences, for example slightly different background color for L1 and
L2, it would help the reading process. Since .epub is basically a bunch of HTML files
packed together, I'm guessing you are storing sentences in different <div> tags which would
be easy to style differently. I tried to look inside the app's folders to see if there is
something resembling styling options or template, but I just dabbled in Python and
JavaScript so far, and wouldn't know where to put my foot in Perl... :(

Another thing that comes to mind after, might I add, a very satisfying experience of
putting together the "Girl with a Dragon Tatoo" parallel text, is a question of what is the
best way to deal with the missing L1 segments. With the source English translation I had
available, after the alignment I had some 300 sentences/segments more in Danish column (out
of around 13k). I know some are to be expected, but they kind of disrupt my reading flow in
the interlined file. Maybe an option to merge them with the previous one...? I'm not sure,
just thinking aloud...

Thanks again for the apps and the hard work you've put in assembling the library on your
site. I'll keep it in mind when the time comes for Hungarian, the next on my hit-list... ;)

I don't have Danish texts, but there is nothing to stop you from finding some. E.g. here's
the Danish Gutenberg page: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/da
And here's wikisource: http://da.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Forfattere-A (you have to
click the letters one by one).

Obviously, the most interesting would be novels that I already have in other languages,
such as Mme Bovary: http://da.wikisource.org/wiki/Fru_Bovary/1
... or popular novels like Oliver Twist (available in Dutch, English and French on
Gutenberg): http://da.wikisource.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist

Re: ebookmaker, it's basically just a complicated way of generating a trivially simple
command and running it. All the actual work is done by calibre. The command ebookmaker
generates is something like
"c:/calibre/ebook-convert.exe" "C:/book.txt" "C:/book.mobi" --authors "Franz Kafka" --title
"La metamorfosis / Az átváltozás" --language "Spanish"

This is simplified a bit but you get the idea. You can choose various output formats
supported by calibre, not just epub... i.e. all the intricate formatting stuff is done by
calibre in different ways depending on what file format is chosen, so I don't have that
much control over it. I could merge orphan segments with the previous segment, it wouldn't
be difficult to implement... but it might be counterproductive in some cases.
In any case, you could re-write ebookmaker in python for your own use quite easily if you
have different preferences, or you could just enter the command in the console manually.
It's just a matter of reading up on ebook-convert.exe and playing with it to see what you
can get out of it. I haven't played with it that much so there might be easy ways of
improving the bilingual books.

1 person has voted this message useful

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4901 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 51 of 51

12 September 2014 at 6:21pm | IP Logged

By the way, I added a bunch of books since I last posted here, so those looking for reading
material should check the
site.

5 persons have voted this message useful

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