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Editing your own parallel texts for LR? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4136 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes  Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 7 29 May 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged |
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So far I've almost entirely just seen people who put together their parallel texts from official translations, and didn't edit them. But is anyone editing the L1 translation to make it closer to the L2 text, for faster learning? I can't be the only one, but as I just started, I don't have any finished novels for you all.
Here are some pieces (you can submit your own there too if you want): http://read-listen-study.tumblr.com/ But I have more I am working on privately (hopefully to sell for cheap later). Very quickly when I began to LR, I found the translations were not so exact and sometimes things were even entirely changed. I couldn't stand reading the wrong things and combating it with the "correct" L2 text, let alone giving them to another learner who was even worse at the language than me to wrongly learn from them, so I started editing the L1 text to match. Also, how are you finding audio? Are you only doing books that have audio purchasable, or are you finding native speakers to record for you? I've had a little luck using rhinospike to ask for recordings, but it takes a long time until someone comes along to record in some cases (it took months for someone to record for Icelandic). Are there any more-used sites where you can ask for long recordings? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6237 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 7 30 May 2013 at 12:47am | IP Logged |
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Some people edit the L1. Atamagaii made quite a lot of 3-column texts, with a third column containing hyperliteral translations, grammatical notes, etc, generally in Polish; unfortunately, I haven't seen many. The main downside is that you can't use the text as well with existing L1 audio if you edit the L1, but that's not much of a downside if you don't have people wanting to use it with the L1 as their L2, or for variants which involve listening to L1.
If the L1 text is generally distant from the L2, I choose another book - really bad translations are as much work to fix as doing a translation from scratch would be. If it's generally close, I trust exposure and statistical frequency to sort out most problems for me, and I find that almost always works; minor glitches are a lot less important with an extensive method than one that requires intensively studying and restudying and analysing small amounts of content. If you're planning to sell texts, make sure they're under a license that allows it - traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and licenses which prohibit commercial use could both be problematic to you. For audio, there's a combination of commercial sources, free websites, etc. Some of the free websites are incredible, like Litterature Audio, with over 3000 French audiobooks - mainly with quite liberal licenses, and Librivox, which has audiobooks in a wide variety of languages. Good luck. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4136 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 7 30 May 2013 at 2:21am | IP Logged |
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Yes, of course I would be a lot more careful with any work to be published than what I do for free, and properly request publishing rights : P
Anyone who for some reason wants the L1 unedited (am I naming them correctly? L1 = native language, L2 = target language?) can use an official translation just like the one that was edited, and people don't need audio for their native language anyway. But with small languages, there is no choice. You have maybe five books that you can find with a translation, and maybe they are... a bit off. Or even really off. I remember translations that condensed whole paragraphs into just a couple sentences, because they either didn't understand the English or didn't think anyone was interested. Does everyone always just buy/find existing audio? No one goes around asking for native speakers to record? Edited by kaptengröt on 30 May 2013 at 2:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 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 4 of 7 30 May 2013 at 9:25am | IP Logged |
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I once managed to find a Russian version of Bulgakov's "The Master and Margeritha", and I printed the first four chapters out as a bilingual text with a machine translation. Well, I probably could have found an English human-made translation, but that isn't the problem here. The problem is that when I found an audioversion of the same work it turned out to have skipped much of the text. So I had to listen to the audio version and mark the sections which were skipped - otherwise I couldn't use the text for LR. And on top of that it was nervewrecking to listen to the histrionics of the actor who read the text. Sometimes he spoke in parseltongue like a snake, sometimes he tried to imbue his pathetic ramblings with a lofty and solemn tone, or he tried to sound ironical and sofisticated .. in short, I hated him, and I had to abandon the project. Later (in February this year if my memory doesn't deceive me) I tried to look at/listen to the materials again, but this time the vomit reflex occurred much earlier, as if my immune system had build up an army of defenders to save me from wasting more time on classical literature and bad actors.
And no, I have never asked a native person to read something aloud. It takes a lot of time, and what then if I don't like it? But it would definitely solve the problem with readings that don't respect the original text. And it would certainly be much faster than making transcripts from preexisting audio. Maybe digital synthethizers will solve the problem - some of them have become fairly decent, and because the chip doesn't have an inkling of an idea about what it is reading aloud it can't be accused of acting. Edited by Iversen on 30 May 2013 at 9:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6237 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 7 30 May 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged |
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You are correct - L1 = base/native language, L2 = target language. I don't use audio for L1; some people have posted about variants where they do.
And yes, some translations and audiobooks are unusable for L-R; I've given up on abridged texts, abridged audiobooks, and poorly-done audiobooks, including ones that poorly attempt to be far too dramatic. I rarely ask native speakers to record; for a book of decent length, say 10 hours of recorded material, that can easily be a 20-40 hour time investment. If you do end up with good recordings and parallel texts for Icelandic and Faroese, I'd gladly buy them (for a reasonable cost, if it's not made ridiculously inconvenient, etc), but they're not high enough on my hitlist that I'm likely to try to get people to record them myself, and the languages which I am most interested in mainly have abundant recordings of decent quality. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5663 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 7 02 June 2013 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure if this was included in what you'd originally said or not, but a nice side effect of keeping the original text more or less intact is that, for example, an Icelandic speaker studying English could use the same parallel text as an English speaker studying Icelandic. But i do tend to make small adjustments to a text as a go through, sometimes providing more literal translations but usually just correcting spelling mistakes and formatting errors.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4626 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 7 05 October 2013 at 3:07am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure if this has been posted before.
I looked for the most recently updated "parallel text" thread in which to post it. I might post it in internet resources, or similar as well: Just came across this: PBO thread PBO - ParallelBook format. You need Aglona Reader to read it....simple download for Windows, or I believe available for Android. Download books from here: Aglona Reader - books download Download Aglona Reader here: Aglona Reader There are so far only a smallish number of English-German, and some Russian - Not sure if both Russian-German and Russian- English, or just R-G... One nice feature is that when Aglona reader opens the book, it uses clever colour shading to help you match the L1 and L2 sentences or clauses, or fragments. Quite neat. The German translations (of the English books, anyway), seem to be new or modified/corrected, so may well not match up with Librivox audio, which I presume are all based on what's in Project Gutenberg, if you happened to want to use that, although I haven't tried it. There is a useful instruction video on the Aglona download page, and I see that there are 3 possible layouts: 1."normal" parallel L1-L2 (you can switch the sides) 2. A sort of semi-interlinear format, which the author (Yanis Batura) says makes reading easier, but you don't see the original formatting. 3. Advanced format for people who can basically read the L2 freely but need help from time to time. In this mode, you normally only see L2, but can highlight text and get a pop-up "translation". You can also use Aglona reader to create your own parallel texts. He's promised to document that in a future video. There are also some hints on the download site about making best use of parallel texts. Anyway, from what I've seen, it's really a very nifty piece of work, and kudos to Yanis Batura and any collaborators. (are you an HTLALer...? - Ap;ogies if so, and you've posted about this already, and I missed it! :-) ) 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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