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Where are the advanced speakers?

  Tags: Advanced Level
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
37 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4
Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4809 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 33 of 37
20 December 2012 at 1:43am | IP Logged 
Well, physical bookstores can justify having a good range but not all of them. Here,
there is a good choice of English,French,German,Spanish,Russian and Italian books in the
largest chain and in a small specialized chain of physical bookstores. The rest usually
has got something in English but even that may be limited. The second largest chain gave
up and doesn't have nearly anything in foreign languages now. Not even good textbooks and
they used to be quite good in that area.

But, I see a lot of potential in ebooks. It is so much easier to get books for exemple in
Swedish as ebooks than to expect anyone bringing them closer or to pay high postal fees.
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 5026 days ago

1493 posts - 2500 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2
Studies: German, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 34 of 37
20 December 2012 at 2:08am | IP Logged 
hrhenry wrote:
Having worked with my share of CAT tools over the years, I would think this would take more than a little bit of work. Sentences often don't work out to a 1-to-1 ratio between languages, and manual alignment usually needs to be done.

emk wrote:
To make Ilya Frank-style books, the alignment wouldn't need to be perfect. I was specifically thinking of algorithms like the following:

[...]
This is mostly just dynamic programming based on sentence lengths and other available data. There may be some good reasons to start with the 1991 paper and try to fill in any missing pieces without actually reading the more recent papers. And if there are a few alignment errors here and there, the reader will probably be able to manage.
[...]

Kyle Corrie wrote:
emk (or anyone interested in creating their own bilingual/parallel texts),

You may want to look into an opensource program called 'hunalign'.

[...]

For those interested, I announced here long ago that I was making a web-based application to 'manually' align entire books at roughly the paragraph level. I've even conducted some beta testing with the help of some HTLALers in the past. The ideas behind it:
-'mediocre' alignment by humans is superior to the best machine-alignments
-as long as translators don't get too creative (another story), literary translations are necessary: we need to know how stuff is said so that it sounds good in the target language.
-output is machine controlled, so it can be produced in a number of different ways, with insertion of links, request of machine translation for paragraphs, generation of glossaries, etc. I've actually had less needs than ideas regarding this part.

Currently you can align a regular novel of 300 pages in a bit more than one hour.

Here you have an example of simple 'pretty' output: Azazel, dual Russian/Spanish, with illustrations, no covers (18 Mb)

7 persons have voted this message useful



Arekkusu
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Canada
bit.ly/qc_10_lec
Joined 5181 days ago

3971 posts - 7747 votes 
Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto
Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian

 
 Message 35 of 37
20 December 2012 at 3:40am | IP Logged 
That is indeed pretty and inviting. Well done. I'm not much into reading or L-R, but you're making me want to
try this for Italian in the new year. When do you think your application may be available?
2 persons have voted this message useful



espejismo
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 4851 days ago

498 posts - 905 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani

 
 Message 36 of 37
20 December 2012 at 5:56am | IP Logged 
mrwarper wrote:

Here you have an example of simple 'pretty' output: Azazel, dual Russian/Spanish, with illustrations, no covers (18 Mb)


Wow, this is so well done! Thanks a lot for sharing it! I'm definitely going to read it soon.

Edited by espejismo on 20 December 2012 at 5:57am

1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6503 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
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 Message 37 of 37
20 December 2012 at 1:31pm | IP Logged 
As I have written before I have switched from 'interspersed' bilinguals (à la Ilya Frank) to a side-by-side layout with two columns, made with tables in MSWord. So I'm fairly familiar with the setup used by mrwarper. However when I pick my sources on the internet I often also get unnecessary elements like pictures (sometimes with attached texts), links, notes and - worst of all - commercials, and the bulk of the ensuing cleaning up operation consists in the removal of such elements. I'm not quite sure how the application of Mrwarper deals with that problem. The texts I use are shorter than a novel so it is not to hard, but for a long text you would definitely want some kind of program to do the job.

One minor additional comment: with almost all my bilingual texts the original is in my target language. This is absolutely necessary when the translator is a machine, but in practice it also the best choice with human made translations - especially if there are specific culture related elements which you want to learn about in the language of that culture.

Edited by Iversen on 20 December 2012 at 1:32pm



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