taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5629 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English
| Message 1 of 18 03 July 2010 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
ABBYY Aligner is a professional tool for aligning parallel texts in various languages and creating Translation Memory
(TM) databases. This easy-to-use and convenient software accurately finds matching segments in parallel texts and
allows saving them into TMX or RTF formats.
( http://www.abbyyusa.com/aligner/ )
i put it to the test using the first Harry Potter book. the result looked more than promising.
you can give it a try using its on-line version here
http://aligner.abbyyonline.com/en
at long last, no tedious work, no more
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5255 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 2 of 18 04 July 2010 at 9:03am | IP Logged |
The online version will only align 50 strings, which makes it pretty much useless and even the full product can only be bought as a volume and/or time limited license.
For this reason alone I'd never buy it even if it were the greatest Aligner there is.
Whoever came up with this harebrained licensing scheme should be fired.
Besides there are less sophisticated Open Source alternatives.
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taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5629 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English
| Message 3 of 18 04 July 2010 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
could you name them please? i'd love to have a go on them.
i agree the license scheme is ridiculous but on the other hand how many "parallel" books do you need? i daresay 20
or 40 at the outside. once you've read them all, you don't need crutches any more, do you? so get them, convert
them, forget about ABBY and enjoy your reading.
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Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5604 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 4 of 18 04 July 2010 at 10:33am | IP Logged |
taqseem wrote:
how many "parallel" books do you need? i daresay 20
or 40 at the outside. once you've read them all, you don't need crutches any more, do you? so get them, convert them, forget about ABBY and enjoy your reading. |
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Unless, like many people on here, you are studying multiple languages.
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taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5629 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English
| Message 5 of 18 04 July 2010 at 11:35am | IP Logged |
when you deal with machine alignment, does it really matter how many books you want the aligner to process? it's
onerous work to align texts manually. i tried LeoBilingua myself. it crashed in the middle of the process - i lost
what i'd been doing for several hours. i'm not paid by ABBY. i just think many people can fork out for a piece of
software that can put their lives out of misery. for practicing L-R you need audiobooks anyway and they will cost
you a fortune.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6374 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 6 of 18 04 July 2010 at 3:00pm | IP Logged |
Hunalign is free and works reasonably well. Its output needs to be processed to be usable for language learners, but that's fairly straightforward.
Edit: and audiobooks don't need to cost a fortune; check out the free, legal audiobooks thread.
Edited by Volte on 04 July 2010 at 3:03pm
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5255 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 7 of 18 04 July 2010 at 3:22pm | IP Logged |
taqseem wrote:
could you name them please? |
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Here you go:
1.Aligner (Open Source)
- Powerful command line tool
- Automatic alignment (quality can be checked via reliability scores)
- Alignment quality can be improved by adding a bilingual text dictionary.
- Creates tab-delimited and/or .tmx files
2. bitext2tmx (Open Source)
- Very simple multilingual GUI
- Manual aligment necessary
- Does not use advanced linguistic matching
- Default segmentation settings need to be customized for best results
- Creates only .tmx files, which need to be converted
3. Wordfast Plus Tools (commercial but free)
- Free macro package for MS Word (part of the Wordfast CAT tool)
- Manual Alignment necessary
- Creates TMs in Wordfast format which need to be converted to .txt files
In case you're wondering how to convert the Wordfast or .tmx file to a plain text file, there's another Freeware tool called Apsic XBench that does just that.
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taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5629 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English
| Message 8 of 18 04 July 2010 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
many thanks for the links!
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