Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 25 of 56 26 February 2011 at 6:13pm | IP Logged |
One thing I forgot to add: I wouldn't consider purchasing readers like this if they use transliteration instead of the native script.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 27 of 56 26 February 2011 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
Juаn wrote:
One thing I forgot to add: I wouldn't consider purchasing readers like this if they use transliteration instead of the native script. |
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The automatic conversion of unwowelized Arabic etexts into transliterated texts is very difficult and labor intensive and therefore not very likely to happen.
Also there are a couple of different scientific and popular transliteration systems.
If you really want to read transliterated texts, your only option will be to read the Qur'an.
You're better off learning the alphabet. It's only 28 letters. See Wikipedia. If you need further instructions, just download this free Arabic textbook for first graders. (Just ignore the Arabic instructions and simply practice writing the letters.)
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 29 of 56 27 February 2011 at 12:17am | IP Logged |
minaaret wrote:
Doitsujin wrote:
Juаn wrote:
One thing I forgot to add: I wouldn't consider purchasing readers like this if they use transliteration instead of the native script. |
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The automatic conversion of unwowelized Arabic etexts into transliterated texts is very difficult and labor intensive and therefore not very likely to happen.
Also there are a couple of different scientific and popular transliteration systems.
If you really want to read transliterated texts, your only option will be to read the Qur'an.
You're better off learning the alphabet. It's only 28 letters. See Wikipedia. If you need further instructions, just download this free Arabic textbook for first graders. (Just ignore the Arabic instructions and simply practice writing the letters.)
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As far as I understand, Juan wants books written in Arabic, and not transliterated. Or is something wrong with my English? When I don't understand something, I always think it is my fault.
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Your English is perfectly fine. Doitsujin responded to the opposite of what Juan wrote.
Back on topic: I agree that the texts should definitely use the native writing system(s) of the languages they are in.
I also prefer original texts in the target language, all else being equal - but all else isn't equal. Particularly good and widely translated books ('The Little Prince', for example) are very useful: they are a gentler introduction to a new language than its most difficult literary texts, and the familiarity of a well-known story does help with L-R. Ideally, there would be a mixture of original and translated texts - but if I had to pick one, I'd pick originals.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 30 of 56 27 February 2011 at 10:22am | IP Logged |
Volte wrote:
Your English is perfectly fine. Doitsujin responded to the opposite of what Juan wrote.
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It seems I was speedreading Juan's post and since many people are discouraged by the alphabet, I assumed that he had written "would" instead of "wouldn't". I guess I'll have to slow down a bit.
While we're at the topic. I reworked my free Arabic-English offline dictionary that I created from the Buckwalter Arabic POS tagger to improve the matching algorithm and will release new Mobipocket and StarDict versions early next week.
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DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6527 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu
| Message 31 of 56 27 February 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
It's nice to see there is interest in this project :-).
There will be a printed version in the native script, and possibly a digital version. I
looked at a few papers about automatic vocalisation of arabic, Doitsujin is right, at
the moment the best systems get about 95% accuracy, and it would be a huge amount of
work to do manually.
I've discovered that there are in fact (I should have searched better) quite a few
English/Arabic bilingual books, mostly translations from English to Arabic. See
http://www.alkitab.com/s1040-ar-dual-language-fictione-a.htm l
(take out the spaces when copying the link)
Following on from what Volte said, if the Arabic is natural and idiomatic, I think
something like 'Alice in Wonderland' or 'The Little Price' are ideal as a first book to
work with. Since the bilingual book is already available, it would just be a matter of
producing the audiobook. I'm looking into this, and it might be the case that we do
these first instead of 'The Days.' (For which I'm still waiting to hear back about
permission to use the translation).
Edited by DavidW on 27 February 2011 at 9:09pm
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Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6260 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese
| Message 32 of 56 27 February 2011 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
Quote:
I've discovered that there are in fact (I should have searched better) quite a
few
English/Arabic bilingual books, mostly translations from English to Arabic. See
http://www.alkitab.com/s1040-ar-dual-language-fictione-a.htm l
(take out the spaces when copying the link)
Following on from what Volte said, if the Arabic is natural and idiomatic, I think
something like 'Alice in Wonderland |
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BTW, there is a scanned
PDF of the bilingual book of Alice in The Wonderland floating around the
internet.
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