Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
I'd love to see e-books with side by side translations. I took enough French in school to recognize a few words here and there, and it would be neat to have the French and English sentences right next to each other. In fact, if that had been available to me when I still actually remembered some French, I probably would have kept reading in French. (I did it for a while in the past, but it was just too slow to keep looking up so many words.)
Surely that's a way to kill three birds with one stone... learn a language, encourage reading at the same time and provide a new application for e-books.
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I don't think side-by-side translations are very useful. Usually when you are reading in a foreign language, you will have a problem understanding a word or an expression, sometimes a grammatical construction. In a side-by-side transaction you won't get any answer to your questions, just a translation of the sentence you are reading. It may not be easy to identify which word or expression translates the one you stumbled on.
IMO a format with notes indicating the translation of words, or explanation of grammatical structures, is much more useful.