5 ms·

Show HN: Practice foreign languages with books (parallel translation and speech)

10 points by mstipetic 11y ago

sdrothrock 11y ago
One suggestion I have is to be able to select multiple sentences and flip them, or break the text into sections and show the target language text on the opposing "page." The reason I suggest this is because many non-Romance and non-Germanic languages are not and cannot be translated 1:1 to English, so the sentence and paragraph structures will be different.
- mstipetic 11y ago
  Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version. That's why I didn't want to put a direct translation, the versions supplied are the original translations, so you can understand the meaning of the sentence from context.
  - sdrothrock 11y ago
    > Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version. Right now, they're per-sentence, as far as I can tell (though I haven't looked very much); I haven't seen any multi-sentence passages (paragraphs) that I can convert all at once. As an example, I was thinking of something like: Translation: "Sentence A. Sentence B. Sentence C." Original: "Sentence B, part of A. Sentence A remainder. Sentence C." In that case, clicking the convert arrow for Sentence B in the translation won't give you anything useful for Sentence B.
luchadorvader 11y ago
I like this idea a lot, but it's somewhat difficult to use when you have to flip back and forth in a sentence to connect parts of it together especially since a lot of languages cannot be translated word for word. It would be nice to see both the sentence and translation at the same time, maybe in a sidebar or a tooltip that hovers above the sentence with the translation. But this is something that I really enjoy using in conjunction with something like duo lingo.
- mstipetic 11y ago
  Thanks! I've gotten mixed requests for both split view and current view. I'm working on adding a split view option. Please let me know if you have any other feedback

10 points by mstipetic 11y ago

One suggestion I have is to be able to select multiple sentences and flip them, or break the text into sections and show the target language text on the opposing "page." The reason I suggest this is because many non-Romance and non-Germanic languages are not and cannot be translated 1:1 to English, so the sentence and paragraph structures will be different.

mstipetic 11y ago
Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version. That's why I didn't want to put a direct translation, the versions supplied are the original translations, so you can understand the meaning of the sentence from context.
- sdrothrock 11y ago
  > Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version. Right now, they're per-sentence, as far as I can tell (though I haven't looked very much); I haven't seen any multi-sentence passages (paragraphs) that I can convert all at once. As an example, I was thinking of something like: Translation: "Sentence A. Sentence B. Sentence C." Original: "Sentence B, part of A. Sentence A remainder. Sentence C." In that case, clicking the convert arrow for Sentence B in the translation won't give you anything useful for Sentence B.

luchadorvader 11y ago

I like this idea a lot, but it's somewhat difficult to use when you have to flip back and forth in a sentence to connect parts of it together especially since a lot of languages cannot be translated word for word. It would be nice to see both the sentence and translation at the same time, maybe in a sidebar or a tooltip that hovers above the sentence with the translation. But this is something that I really enjoy using in conjunction with something like duo lingo.

mstipetic 11y ago
Thanks! I've gotten mixed requests for both split view and current view. I'm working on adding a split view option. Please let me know if you have any other feedback