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An idea about L-R application | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4054 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 3 14 August 2013 at 12:20am | IP Logged |
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So an idea came to my head last night after I had read about listening-reading and having tried it the day before. Creating these dual-language books and finding the correct audio can be and is a daunting and off-putting task (unless you are very determined, I like to think I am), and I was wondering how much effort would it be to code a software something similar to what I in my brain devised;
One would ideally load a pre-formatted file for the application to run which would contain a text, split into paragraphs, the audio for it and as an extra thing maybe even the directions for a little "karaoke-dot" pointer to run above the target text along the audio. This is how it went in my head; you go to the developers' site which has this database of, let's say ".lrf" files. Hypothetically you want to learn Russian and you are a native English speaker. You go to the database website and are faced with an alphabetical list of authors in the database. You navigate to, say, "Dostoyevsky, Fyodor" and click on the name. Then you are faced with a list of books of his that exist in the database, and you click further on "White Nights". Then you are faced with a list of supported languages; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - White Nights_RUS_ORIG.lrf (txt) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - White Nights_ENG.lrf (txt) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - White Nights_ITA.lrf (txt) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - White Nights_FIN.lrf (txt) Thereon you boot the application. Ideally you click on "Load L1" and seek out the ENG (txt) file you downloaded and "Load L2" for the Russian .lrf file you downloaded, and you're all set. These supposed ".lrf" files would be comprised ideally of pre-existing materials, such as unabridged e- and audiobooks. Audio files need not be made for more languages than the original one of the work though, which would save a lot of effort. The books would be old classics of which there exist a wealth of recordings and translations (albeit all translations are not as faithful to the original as they need to be for this). Books could also be by contemporary authors who want their stuff to be spread for free, thus gaining exposure, or something. I'm overthinking it already at this point. Do you guys think it's possible? Does it exist already? I just wanted to let my thoughts out just in case there would be one poor soul that would become interested in the idea. My first question is that is L-R such a good method that it warrants the trouble? It seems to be but what do you experienced striders have to tell about it? Would this be useful or pointless? Edited by Henkkles on 14 August 2013 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6240 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 3 14 August 2013 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
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The main problem for public L-R sites is content: most good audiobooks and translations are under copyright, and not licensed in a way that makes redistribution particularly easy, much less redistribution of modified forms (like parallel texts, or reformatted versions). There are some good redistributable and modifiable materials, but not all that many: even if there's a good audiobook and text in this category, the translations may all either be recent (and under default copyright rules), or old, with dated usages and in some languages, several spelling reforms behind the current ones. And audiobook availability is a big problem: only a tiny minority of audiobooks are under an open license (and essentially none are open due to age), and only a fraction of those are any good.
Audiobooks in non-original languages are quite useful: translations into the L2 from your L1 are often a bit easier, and some books are good and useful enough to be worth the extra loss of information from having both L1 and L2 be translations. Contemporary authors interested in open licenses and gaining attention can be an ok source for a text, but very rarely have a good audiobook or a good translation, much less both. Making the parallel texts, given the right combinations of materials, is a pretty easy task, which also works better with a bit of manual checking afterwards. I don't see a reason to do it on-the-fly - if you've already significantly pre-processed the texts, you may as well make them available for each language pair, with only very rare exceptions (like "The Little Prince") having enough good translations for it to make sense to limit generation to the ones someone expresses an interest in. Alternatively, just make a parallel text of all the translations, and strip out the unneeded ones on the fly. You've got a nice solution that unfortunately mainly deals with the wrong set of problems. If someone builds it anyhow, I'd try it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ross Newbie China anylano.com Joined 5288 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English | Message 3 of 3 19 August 2013 at 8:51am | IP Logged |
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Henkkles: You can try anylango. Although it is not exactly the application you images, it worth to have a try.
Anylango support almost all types of subtitles and multimedia formats. Taking those creation courseware wizards, you can create your favorites movies and songs into study materials. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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