Bilingual Texts for German? (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

Bilingual Texts for German?
Tags: Bilingual texts \| German
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Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

14 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Doitsujin
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5325 days ago
1256 posts - 2363 votes

Speaks: German*, English

Message 9 of 14

28 November 2013 at 8:28am | IP Logged

chokofingrz wrote:

In fact I don't know if Kindles are capable of this at all.

The screens of most ebook readers are too small to display two pages or two columns simultaneously. In the dtv zweisprachig ePub editions (which you can convert to Kindle books without any problems) they solved this problem by hyperlinking sections in the original text to a version of the book with the translation below.

Original view:

Linked page with translations:

3 persons have voted this message useful

montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4833 days ago
2371 posts - 3676 votes

Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

Message 10 of 14

06 December 2013 at 10:45pm | IP Logged

I've now finished preparing a couple of German novels in German-English parallel form, in
PBO format, i.e. for reading with
Aglona Reader

If you are interesting, please PM me (only - I won't answer questions on here)..
1 person has voted this message useful

Gemuse
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4087 days ago
818 posts - 1189 votes

Speaks: English
Studies: German

Message 11 of 14

01 January 2014 at 8:50am | IP Logged

TehGarnt wrote:

The German works that get the dual-language treatment are usually
fairly highbrow and
have corresondingly advanced vocabulary and syntax, so aren't necessarily appropriate
for early-stage learning. The Penguin short stories and the misleadingly-titled "First
German Reader" by Harry Steinhauer fall into this category, although they are otherwise
great. Also, I find that longer texts from a single author are better than short
stories for learning, as words and structures tend to be repeated throughout the text.

As for recommendations, the Dover publications book of "Selected Folktales" by the
brothers Grimm is fairly easy if antiquated reading, and their Kafka compilation is
great if rather hard. Plays are fairly easy to understand, e.g. "Der Besuch der Alten
Dame" and "Biedermann und die Brandstifter".

Finally, the German publisher DTV has an excellent selection of zweisprachig books in
many languages, and has the advantage that the German translations are modern German.
If you don't mind the fact that source material isn't German literature they offer a
huge amount of material.
DTV Zweisprachig

Thanks!!!!

I dont care about the literature being non-German, so will get some DTV books.
1 person has voted this message useful

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4905 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 12 of 14

11 January 2014 at 3:02pm | IP Logged

I have four novels on my site with German:
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (fr-en-hu-de)
Niccolò Machiavelli: Il Principe (en-hu-it-de)
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher (en-hu-es-it-fr-de-eo)
Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer (en-de-hu-nl-ca)

http://www.farkastranslations.com/bilingual_books.php
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patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4538 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes

Studies: German

Message 13 of 14

11 January 2014 at 3:58pm | IP Logged

chokofingrz wrote:

I can vouch for this Penguin Parallel Text, though you will need at least B1 reading level to get anything out of it (probably C2+ to fully understand everything). Get the paperback because the Kindle edition is an epic fail.

I am curious if you are already fairly advanced parallel text would be better than simply reading a book in German with a pop-up dictionary.

That's what I've been doing for the last year, and it works well for me. At my level parallel texts would simply slow me down too much, and I don't want to keep switching to my L1 all the time.

What the big attraction of parallel texts once you get to an intermediate stage?
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montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4833 days ago
2371 posts - 3676 votes

Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

Message 14 of 14

11 January 2014 at 6:11pm | IP Logged

patrickwilken wrote:

chokofingrz wrote:

I can vouch for this
Penguin Parallel Text,
though you will need at least B1 reading level to get anything out of it (probably C2+
to fully understand everything). Get the paperback because the Kindle edition is an
epic fail.

I am curious if you are already fairly advanced parallel text would be better than
simply reading a book in German with a pop-up dictionary.

That's what I've been doing for the last year, and it works well for me. At my level
parallel texts would simply slow me down too much, and I don't want to keep switching
to my L1 all the time.

What the big attraction of parallel texts once you get to an intermediate stage?

I think each approach has its pros and cons.

if you use Aglona
Reader and .pbo format books, it has three reading modes:

1. is straight parallel, although fragments are highlighted in colour to help your eye
quickly match corresponding phrases, sentences, sometimes words.

2. Something similar to interlaced, although it's not quite that. Arguably easier to
read than 1. though.

3. For the advanced reader, what is presented is all TL, but you can optionally display
any chosen fragment in the translated version - similar in a way to using a pop-up
dictionary.

There are some sample books here if anyone wants to try it:
Parallel Books

The arguable advantage of using a good translation (whether it be in a parallel-text
form or not) is that if you use a dictionary (pop-up or not), you then have to stop and
think which of the various meanings that might not be offered is most appropriate here.
Using a translation, you accept (at least for the time being) the translation offered
by the translator, presumably (one assumes) after a great deal of thought (and based on
years of experience, one also assumes).

The disadvantage of .pbo is that so far, there are very few books available yet in that
format. However, the means to produce them is also freely available, since you can use
Aglona Reader in edit mode. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it's quite an
interesting and rewarding experience in itself, and I urge people to give it a try,
even if only for short texts, to begin with.

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