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How do you make parallel texts? | ||
Tags: Bilingual texts | Audiobook | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| OliverB Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5247 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian, French | Message 1 of 18 29 December 2009 at 8:21pm | IP Logged |
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I have the polish translations of harry potter, the acompanying audio books and the original English version. How do I make a parallel text out of these?
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| OliverB Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5247 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian, French | Message 3 of 18 30 December 2009 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
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Even if this is true, I would still like to know how to make parallel texts.
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6705 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 18 30 December 2009 at 2:04am | IP Logged |
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Assuming you have both languages in digital format (html, word, OCR scanned pdf document etc.) you just create a two column table in a word processor, and copy/paste the contents.
The quality of the translation as well as the structure of the language may affect the alignment of the paragraphs. More info here: Creating parallel texts 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6648 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 6 of 18 30 December 2009 at 10:01pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't tried the sites bżóh gave in the post above.
I tried ABBYY Aligner software before, and it does make it easier - it lets you skip to the last stage of proofreading your text. You can try a trial 15 day version. The catch is that you can export the text you prepared to a word file only 50 lines at the time. I did that, then deleted 50 lines manually, and repeated. Doc files are easy enough to merge. EDIT: I tried the program recommended by bzuh and it's better than ABBYY: http://shalnov.ru/school/text-makebilingua.html that's another one but I don't know how to use it yet. Maybe you can figure it out http://www.hot.ee/bclogic/index.html Edited by Kubelek on 09 January 2010 at 1:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Kuunhalme Pentaglot Newbie FinlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5963 days ago 25 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Hungarian, Latvian Studies: Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Georgian, Lithuanian | Message 7 of 18 09 January 2010 at 2:26am | IP Logged |
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I would suggest that once you have the texts in digital format, paste each one of them into MS Word and perform a replace operation in both of them, replacing each space following a period with a line break. Then paste them to Excel and align them. When both texts have been edited like this, aligning will probably take much less time. What is more, the shorter units allow you to consult the translation more often, which is great if you are not yet on an advanced level and/or want to read the interlinear texts on your mobile phone, a method which I will also explain below.
The Word part: 1) Select the text with Ctrl+A 2) Press Ctrl+F and go to the Replace tab 3) In case there are undesired line breaks in the document (i.e. in the middle of a sentence), now is the time to remove them. Find what: enter "^p" without quotes (it stands for a line break, which you also get by selecting More/Special/Paragraph Mark) ; Replace with: enter " " (one space) without quotes 4) After removing line breaks or for some other reason there might be some superfluous spaces. Find what: enter " " (two spaces) without quotes ; Replace with: enter " " (one space) without quotes ; repeat a few times if needed 5) Now let's make a line break after each period! Find what: enter ". " (without quotes) ; Replace with: enter ".^p" (without quotes) 6) If you wish, you may also perform the same operation with question marks and exclamation marks. But you may sometimes find out that they are not used equally often in all languages, which makes the alignment slower. 7) Repeat all steps with all parallel texts. The Excel part: 1) Paste text 1 to a column 2) Paste text 2 to a column next to it (and text 3 next to it etc.) 3) Cut and paste either one of the texts so that they are aligned by cutting and pasting and inserting and deleting rows. This is the most-consuming part, but thanks to the period operation it should be faster and less boring. And here's the mobile phone part which I heartily recommend to anyone using public transport daily: 1) Make a new Excel file 2) Decide which language should come first. Typically it will the language you are trying to learn. Copy the column of that language from the previous Excel file and paste it to column A of the new file. Then copy the column of the supporting language from the previous Excel file to the column B of the new file. 3) Select both columns and copy them with Ctrl+C 4) Open Notepad and paste the clipboard contents with Ctrl+V 5) Save the text file, and don't forget to use the Unicode encoding 6) Now you need a nifty little program called TequilaCat BookReader. Download and run it, choose your phone model and add the saved text file as a book. Press Build to create a file for the phone. If it's a long text, you might want to make the "Max Jar Size" under "Set Path and Properties" bigger so that the text is not divided into chunks. 7) Move the phone file to the SD card of your mobile phone 8) Read and have fun! 9) Don't forget to get out at the right bus stop! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| jerrypettit Groupie United States Joined 5822 days ago 79 posts - 103 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 18 16 January 2010 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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Couple questions: Why are there missing posts in this topic? (2 and 5)
Also--I'm getting a virus warning when I try and go to the recommended site http://www.hot.ee/bclogic/inde x.html 1 person has voted this message useful |
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