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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 9 of 10 06 November 2007 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
That's what I'm going to do, but it's 300+ pages so it will take a long time. Also, the parahraphs aren't the same in the translation. What is the beggining of a paragraph in the french original is the middle of a sentence(mid paragraph) in the english translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 10 06 November 2007 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have made a lot of interlaced bilingual texts using the method I wrote about in Siomotteikiru's thread about the reading-listening technique (page 9). However it is impossible to find anything in such a long thread so I'll repeat the main points:
I take a text and its translation into a better-known language. I put each of them in its own Word window and put one window above the other on my screen. Then I start subdividing the texts in parallel chunks of about 2/3 of the width of the screen, each chunk on its own line. I take care that each chunk in one language as far as possible corresponds to one chunk in the other (it is not as difficult as you might think if the translation is faithful to the original) Then I open a spreadsheet (for instance Excel) and put one text in column C, the other in column F. I fill column A and D with numbers 1,2.... , and afterwards I fill column B and E with respectively a's and b's. At this point I check that the two versions of the text really correspond line for line to each other, and I give the translation a different color and font. Then I cut the content of the three columns D,E,F out and place it below the content of columns A.B,C. The idea behind this arrangement is that I now can sort the whole thing according to columns A and B, which gives me this: 1 a blahblah (language 1) 1 b blahblah (language 2) 2 a blahblah (language 1) 2 b blahblah (language 2) ... The last thing to do is to copy the content of column C (i.e. the interlaced texts) to Word, where it appears as a table whose lines can in principle be removed without harming the content of the cells, - but it is not really necessary to do it. That's all.
300+ pages will take a very long time to prepare. I only use the interlaced texts for active reading, and then a few pages per session are enough. In the original Siomotteikiru method the idea was to use the translation as a key when listening to many, many hours of audio (and then later the original text for the same purpose). But you don't need interlaced texts for that. It is not important where the full stops and minor punctuation marks in the text are. It is slightly more problematic when the elements in long sentences don't appear in the same order. But as I said, I have made a fair number of these interlaced texts, and the problems are not nearly as big as you might think. Edited by Iversen on 06 November 2007 at 5:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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