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EReader suited for bi-lingual texts? | ||
Tags: Gadget | Bilingual texts | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| gizmo2012 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4903 days ago 49 posts - 49 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French | Message 9 of 13 14 December 2010 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know you will stick with your opinion and this is the last I'm going to say on it as well but the market is in English, it is only the early ones with the chinese market. they've updated them a lot since then and I really recommend you try one out and make your own decision.
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| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5242 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 10 of 13 16 December 2010 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have a Kindle, Sony Reader, and iPod Touch all of which I use and bilingual columns is not usable with text-based ebook formats like ePUB or MOBI, so you are stuck with PDF. Automatically, this kills one of the best features of such readers--dictionary lookup--not to mention highlighting, etc. I'm not really a fan of the PDF mode, though it is usable and probably would be a lot nicer on the DX's big screen.
Now, the prospects are much better for using the Kindle with monolingual books in your target language. Its dictionary support is much better than the competition and can be replaced with any DRM-free MOBI dictionary (including L2->L1 bilingual ones). In this way you can read freely in L2 only, then use the dictionary to look up English definitions for words you don't know. Kindle 2 and later has pretty good unicode support for non-english character sets. The downside is that the selection of non-english ebooks (in ePUB or MOBI) in the stores and libraries is very small. I've read Esperanto and Ancient Greek books on it which I have created myself from public domain sources, but this takes time and know-how to do. If you are going the PDF route, IMO you *must* have a device with a large enough screen to comfortably show the entire page, preferably two pages for bilingual use. d. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4939 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 11 of 13 16 December 2010 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
That size screen doesn't really exist, does it? And if it did, such a large screen would defeat the purpose of carrying it around. A single PDF page is difficult on a 7 to 9 inch screen. I doubt two pages would be readable without zooming. That said, I read PDFs on a smaller screen, but I do have to zoom. There are ways to convert PDFs to either epub or mobi so they can re-flow better on a smaller screen, but the output is often really bad. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5242 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 12 of 13 16 December 2010 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
The iPad and Kindle DX screens are roughly the same size as a page from a "trade paperback" book, so you would think a PDF page should be readable at that size--assuming the PDF wasn't created with a much larger page size in mind, which is always a problem with PDF... That said, I don't own either of these devices so I don't know in practice. I personally would be happy with "zoom to width" modes with that size screen so perhaps my "must" was hyperbolic. Though, I agree regarding 2 pages. Is it possible to zoom to width while displaying two pages on any devices? Perhaps that would be readable while holding the device sideways. d. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5129 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 13 of 13 16 December 2010 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
There are lots of free out-of-copyright non-English ebooks available at Project Gutenberg. Languages with more than 50 books are: Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Tagalog. All can be downloaded either as MOBI or ePUB files. If you have an iPhone or an iPad download the free Stanza app to see what's available. However, MOBI files are better displayed in the free Kindle app for iPhone. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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