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Creating Parallel Texts | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6414 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 10 05 November 2007 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is a rather limited amount of parallel text format books for purchase so I'm considering making my own. What programs/methods do you use to make them?
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| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6378 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 10 05 November 2007 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you have two relatively short texts and they are available in html, then you just create a two column table in a word processing program and copy/paste the texts into it.
If you want to use texts from books (and assuming you don't want to type the entire texts in by hand) then you would have to scan them using OCR software so you could copy/paste them. I haven't had any luck doing this and don't know if it's because of my scanner or the OCR software, so if anyone has advice for that I'd appreciate it. I've also heard of attempts to develop software for aligning texts of different languages but I don't know if any have been made available to the public yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6651 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 3 of 10 06 November 2007 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I've done this a few times via cutting and pasting into Word columns, then adjusting the text to line up better. As long as they're both already electronic, it's not to difficult, just more time consuming the longer the texts.
I did it for Pinnochio in Italian about a year ago. Took awhile, but it's a good resource. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6414 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 10 06 November 2007 at 8:48am | IP Logged | ||
I've been using two column tables in MS word and it works but it's kind of messy. The text isn't aligned perfectly like assimil, but it's still better than holding two books. Part of the problem is that the english translation doesn't stay very close to the original. Here is a parallel text I made of Les trois mousquetaires so you can see the problem. Edited by lloydkirk on 06 November 2007 at 8:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6378 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 06 November 2007 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Believe me, I'm fully aware of the problems with aligning text. I've created several Japanese/English parallel texts and manually aligned the two texts like how Assimil does it--sentence by sentence, but that was too time consuming. Now I break the texts up into smaller sections of a few sentences each, which is a lot quicker to do. Although the sentence by sentence texts are better, it's just not practical for very long works.
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| urubu Pentaglot Groupie Germany Joined 6607 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, Dutch, Portuguese, Indonesian, English | Message 6 of 10 06 November 2007 at 10:14am | IP Logged | ||
Most computer-aided translation systems offer an alignment module nowadays. A free one is PlusTools: http://www.wordfast.net/index.php?whichpage=plustools&lang=e ngb Read the PlusTools manual before starting, though. Aligning is often quite time-consuming. Best regards, Michael Edited by urubu on 06 November 2007 at 10:17am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7189 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 7 of 10 06 November 2007 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow... Creating my own parallel texts was never something that actually occurred to me! I may need to go find some books and do this. Good idea!
Lloydkirk, couldn't you have just gone through the text and adjusted it so that the start of each paragraph lines up? I don't imagine it would take too long, and I bet it would help considerably. Edited by Darobat on 06 November 2007 at 12:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 8 of 10 06 November 2007 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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For those who can read some Russian, Ilya Frank's web site has a page with links to several programs to read and/or edit parallel texts. I haven't tried any of them myself, so I don't know how helpful they might be.
Edited by frenkeld on 06 November 2007 at 12:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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