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Who is Creating Parallel Texts? | ||
Tags: Bilingual texts | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4273 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes  Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 65 of 76 12 January 2013 at 11:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
(Scandinavians are MUCH much nicer about it than Icelanders, Scandinavia is a godsend compared to Iceland and I have never had anyone here or from here switch to English with me or be mean to me. I really don't know where that "switch to English" stereotype comes with Scandinavia. I have however heard the same things about Finns from Finnish learners as I have experienced with Iceland, on the "insulting you on your skills and not wanting to speak to you" area. I have never heard anything about Asians or Latin Americans not speaking their language to you, except someone in another thread who was saying people just shook their head at them when they tried to speak Mandarin.) That is because you were a tourist (and in tourist season they are also glad anyone can even say thanks in Icelandic since it becomes so that you hear more foreign-language than Icelandic when you go anywhere). I really don't like saying it, because it does sound mean and me, my flatmates, my wife, her boss, we all were always constantly saying "well it's just bad luck, the next person I meet will follow through and be nice". Well, that is not quite correct, if you were wearing all black then they probably thought you lived in Iceland, since you can tell the tourists and foreigners apart by the colours they wear. I didn't realize just how different tourist season was in my first year, but my second year (although there was the most tourism that year they ever had so far) I realised they actually re-arrange the stores to put the items for tourists closer to the front, and start using English automatically to everyone, and if you say "góðan daginn, takk" sometimes the cashier looks extremely amazed at you. The postal office workers eventually did know to use only Icelandic with me and my wife, since we saw them so often. Once I tried to force a bookstore cashier to use Icelandic but all it amounted to was he actually ended up saying half his conversation in English and half his conversation in Icelandic with English immediately after the Icelandic... Some people repeat it in English before you can even open your mouth to reply in Icelandic. Once I had a girl have a long conversation with a co-worker about how the computer was broken and then she (in pretty bad English) tried to describe "there is a problem, just wait" even though I had just conducted our conversation in Icelandic when I was going to buy the book. Often also the bank people do stuff like you have the conversation in Icelandic "Hello, I want to exchange this money, yes bills, thanks" then they turn to do something else for a sec and forget their conversation with you had been in Icelandic, and use English when they turn back. It has actually only once happened that (a doctor) did the opposite and was using English then glanced at the computer then started using Icelandic, hahaha. Oh, and I have ALWAYS gotten Icelandic Emails whenever I buy something online, even if my address and name are not Icelandic. That is nice. Although come to think of it, maybe they are automatic. Anyway, the point is that you can have ten billion cashier conversations in Icelandic but it is not going to make you fluent in Icelandic since you are only hearing/using the same very small handful of words over and over. But yours was my exact same experience as a tourist (and some of my friends, who were only exchange students, people treated them the same way - it's because you are not actually staying). When you are a tourist, they are super excited to talk with you and love to listen to your Icelandic. When people realize you are actually live in Iceland and are going to continue living in Iceland for some time, that's when it starts happening. Not only with strangers, my own friends did it to me too (they were perfectly nice, helpful, and supportive online but once I moved they almost immediately quit being so). They treat tourists, people with near-perfect Icelandic, people with Icelandic relatives (usually), and people who are together with Icelanders (ex. marriage) a lot differently, even within those there are different degrees. I do like Iceland still but after I moved there (I did visit before I went, for a month, too) I realized the Icelandic people are never going to be nice unless my Icelandic is already almost perfect. Of course there are some people who speak in Icelandic to you when you are an immigrant - meaning other immigrants, homeless-type alcoholics, anyone speaking to you for only a very short time (store clerks, delivery men, librarians etc.), people who hate English, people who don't know English, little kids, and your teachers at school, people who are drunk or on drugs (and I do not drink nor go to parties). Apart from that I never actually had anyone who knew Icelandic and would speak in it to me. Even my friends who "tried", they immediately stopped because I was too bad for them to listen to (except they could listen to their foreign spouses who were even worse than me just fine, and spoke with me just fine when I knew only tourist phrases, err...?). The people who really seemed nice and like "the next time we meet, they will speak in all Icelandic to me", we never actually ended up meeting again since every young Icelander is also so incredibly busy doing something-or-other and has no time and can only meet you once a year... (that was also something that was a lot different when I was a tourist, everyone could hang out with me every day of course!). Even if an Icelander does start talking to you, they do exactly as you say. They "restart" the conversation by asking you extremely basic questions like "how are you?", even if you have already explained to them you've been studying Icelandic for over a year at the University for example and that you can actually understand Icelandic. It is great for a true beginner, but when you can already read novels, newspapers, and your courses are taught all in Icelandic at school and everything, it is pretty dumb. But that's the thing. It's very clear that the language is the problem, not your skin colour or where you are actually from or whatever. So if you can manage to improve your language skills a lot somehow without native speakers, or if you can find native speakers in your own country (who are most likely much nicer than Icelanders-in-Iceland), everything will be just fine. And you can always continue to be treated wonderfully as a tourist : P I will also note that Icelanders are much, much more open to write Icelandic with you online for some very strange reason, translate things for you, even possibly occasionally correcting some of your Icelandic, etc. Even the same ones who would insult you in person. And also I only lived in Reykjavík where people are probably meaner than in other places, when I move back to Iceland in fifty years I will definitely not live there again (although it pains me to think of living in a place that is even SMALLER than Rvk). (okay, time to end the unrelated stuff!) As for the parallel texts, it is taking forever so I am nowhere near done yet, but I did just (hopefully - as long as no one bought it first and they will ship to Sweden) purchase a Nabokov novel in Icelandic and the bookstore had part of the first chapter typed up for previewing!! So I saved it and I can make a bilingual one out of that, to test some alignment software. Edited by kaptengröt on 12 January 2013 at 12:22pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4273 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 66 of 76 12 January 2013 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know about you, but I am really used to extremely lazy learners who won't pick up something if it isn't completely suited to their preferences already... Since I am putting work into it anyway, why not put in a little more just to make them happy haha. But I wasn't going to do any cell arranging, I was just going to have one be just as in the pictures I linked and then one be more paragraph-based with less notes somehow. I might be confusing what you mean though. Edited by kaptengröt on 12 January 2013 at 12:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4642 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 67 of 76 12 January 2013 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Obviously. But I am going to learn Icelandic in the future and I can win this battle; I am more stubborn than they are. :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5161 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 68 of 76 12 January 2013 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Same here, but I don't see the point of doing manually what a machine can do for you. Every bit of work I put into something is aimed at not putting another one unnecessarily in the future. Once texts are properly aligned*, they can be put in a central repository (think some web) where output options (ePub, PDF, in columns, in alternate pages, whatever) are automated and linked to buttons (think 'download as'), the point being: 1) users have a wide spectrum of preferences 2) I wouldn't want anyone to work on the same text twice 3) I wouldn't want to discriminate users because I don't like their format preferences. *The hard work of it all (what must be done by humans) is aligning the texts, because alignment algorithms fail just the way (and for the same reasons) that machine translation does. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4273 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 69 of 76 13 January 2013 at 4:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I see, that sounds very cool!! I would definitely want to try that.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 70 of 76 16 January 2013 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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As I have written earlier, I simply cut pieces of the original and of the translation into parallel columns in MSword and then align them by moving the dividing line (and maybe do some fine tuning through extra lines and through font size changes of short passages). It may be better to use software if you are dealing with a whole book, but the manual method doesn't really take much time with shorter texts of for instance 5-10 pages. In some cases pictures and formatting can pose a problem, but given that it mainly is the text that is relevant you can just remove the pictures or convert both versions to text.
The real problem is finding sufficiently literal translations. Edited by Iversen on 07 May 2014 at 2:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4273 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 71 of 76 17 January 2013 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Luckily with the Icelandic, I am making the translation myself so it can be extremely literal, but I had been thinking about this when reading a Japanese translation. It's really strange when a translator does it quite literally most of the time, and then for no reason at all does stuff like condenses a paragraph or adds little things (like adding "he said", when the original doesn't say it and you would already know he was the one saying it anyway - and in Kokoro, they changed "kimono" to "summer dress" once but later on kept it as kimono). It doesn't even take much knowledge of the other language to figure out when they are doing it sometimes. I understand it when the whole book is translated kind of freely, but not where the sense is in only doing it sometimes. Like in this Icelandic Sherlock Holmes, they are doing fine in general, but for no reason they are completely getting rid of a lot of Watson's personal thoughts. Are there books where people have noticed they seem to be translated more literally or less across many different languages? We could keep notes on which ones might be good or bad for beginners based on that. Edited by kaptengröt on 17 January 2013 at 7:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5161 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 72 of 76 18 January 2013 at 6:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I've been terribly busy this week, and I still am, I'll contact you again by mid-week, hopefully.
Yes, we all end up repeating ourselves, don't we? :)
I'm a big fan of leaving computing (i.e. "complex" tasks) to computers and preexisting programs, but given this is a specialized and simple task, it isn't a whole lot of work to write a new one that does a better job and can be executed pretty much everywhere. Being web-based, think of portable devices and how much more ubiquitous and convenient than computers these have become.
I don't agree. Software translation is notoriously bad because it's too literal, but it has become ubiquitous as well, so it is increasingly easier to assemble one on the spot (assuming it is necessary at all) from the original text and online translators / dictionaries. That's the magic of software, and you can't get any more literal than a bunch of single word look-ups strung together. With word look-up available at your fingertips, I don't see the need for literal translations, though. OTOH good translations (the ones that focus on preserving meaning, style, and individual words, in that order) are always scarce, impossible to generate and most useful for learners, for they grant you'll leap from a bunch of individual meanings to understanding the thing as a whole if you can't make it on your own yet.. Learners can -and often do- use dictionaries, either paper or computer-powered, but fail at grasping (or even recognize) expressions and idiomatic stuff. Which is also the kind of stuff which is most difficult to look up automatically. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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