Study-and-click: 3 hours (46 total)
Current text: Евгений Замятин, “Мы”
New words clicked whilst listening and reading: 253 (2,764 total)
New words clicked whilst listening only: 173 (2,376 total)
Current estimated reading level: B1
I prefer sticking with the story on the Russian side as much as possible now, finding that I need the translation less and less. Often I don’t bother translating silently into English at all, and just watch the scenes unfold and play out in my mind’s eye. I also enjoy diving into new Russian expressions and getting in touch with the real essence or soul of the story, as the translation often varies from the original meaning considerably and is no substitute for the real thing.
How do you go about making your bilingual parallel texts? I am about to embark on such an adventure, but don’t know a way to start that isn’t going to take me forever to do.
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Hi James! I feel your pain here. I used to get a copy of the original e-text and it’s translation, and then spend a considerable amount of time aligning the sentences by hand in a numbered dual-window text editor such as TextWrangler. Once done, I would import this into an Excel file and tidy it all up for printing.
Now I use a program called hunalign to do most of the donkey work for me, which another WordPress member named Doviende kindly led me on to. And it’s a great little time-saver too! 🙂 The program automatically aligns my text files (the original and translation) on a sentence by sentence basis, using a sentence length algorithm and a custom dictionary (I just make my own csv-style dictionary file using Google Translate). Here’s the link for the program: http://mokk.bme.hu/resources/hunalign.
Best of luck with your adventures in Arabic this year (as well as Italian, French, German and Swedish I believe) and becoming a professional singer! I was only just leafing through my book of Arabic calligraphy in manuscripts last night and thinking how wonderful it would be to take up the challenge properly some day. 🙂
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Thanks! I downloaded the source package, but can’t figure out how to make it work on my mac. Is there a guide as to how to use it, or direct me to someone who can walk me through it? Sorry to hijack this blog comment section.
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I initially encountered the same problem on my mac, and just cheated at the time by using my girlfriend’s laptop which runs Windows XP. I’ve since gone out and bought a new MBP that runs Snow Leopard (as the old box of apples eventually went bad after a few years – i.e. another logic board bites the dust), and after installing the Xcode developer tools from the first install disk, hey presto…it works just fine now!
I found another script this evening called “LF aligner” that’s built on top of hunalign (which already comes included as part of the package) and makes the whole process so much easier. It looks really promising and even exports to Excel…here’s the link: http://www.downloadplex.com/Mac/System-Utilities/Other/lf-aligner-for-mac_326183.html. Enjoy! 🙂
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Hey Teango, I’ve tried both tools (LF Aligner and Hunalign) and it works great for French/English, but they both complain about my Russian text files. Is there any sort of trick to getting Russian files to work? Thanks.
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It’s been a while since I aligned any texts, but as I recall, there’s always a bit of manual tidy-up to do afterwards anyway. You’ll also find that many books (even Harry Potter 😉 ) are carelessly translated into Russian, and it’s not unusual to discover whole sections missing from time to time which definitely throws the aligner. The main trick is to initially get the optimal alignment by i) making sure the encoding’s right between documents and software (usually KOIR-8), ii) replacing mismatched characters such as Russian quote marks, hyphens and ellipses, and iii) constructing your own custom dictionary files using the vocabulary in the books (e.g. I run a script to extract all the unique words from a book first, clean up punctuation, and then use Google Translate in waves to add approximate translations). Удачи! 🙂
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Thanks! I finally got it working, and it’s not the Russian translation but rather the English (as they’re native Russian novels), and even more difficult having a very basic knowledge of Russian. I’m not really sure that it helps in aligning, although it could very well be the awful translation (or maybe it’s from another edition of the book?). Thanks again 🙂
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