Quote:
Originally Posted by MacEachaidh
I'm looking to format some ePubs of stories for language students, and ... well, I'd be grateful for thoughts/ideas on how best to do it.
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Sounds like a FANTASTIC project!
May I ask what the source document is that you are working from?
Is this a book/documents that are written in DOCs and you have the originals? Is it HTML off of a website, that you are converting into books? Is it a scan of a book that is in PDF (may the gods help you)?
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacEachaidh
In print form, with static formatting, I'd probably break the page into two columns, and have the Gaelic in one column and the English in the other, with lines matching up. But in an eBook?
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Indeed, creating a huge two-column table would be an "ok" way to handle it, IF you can guarantee that readers will be reading on a large enough screen (aka, ONLY reading this EPUB on a PC monitor).
The two-column table method would break horribly though on anything small, and if you begin doing things like raising the font-size too large.
ADE is notorious for being very buggy with extremely large tables (for example, text in a cell that overflows to the next page will just POOF into thin air).
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacEachaidh
Alternating lines in the two languages, I think, would make it too hard to read either language, and different font or screen sizes would make a mess of it instantly, What about alternating paragraphs?
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I would probably tackle it at the paragraph level, although that judgement should probably be left up to someone who actually reads dual-language books.... I would have to see how other dual-language books handle it (I am not fluent in anything besides English, so I never read one).
I see that there was a post here explaining an English-French EPUB (although the links to the samples are dead, perhaps try emailing the person?):
http://giwan.hubpages.com/hub/Dual-Language-eBooks
There is also a few free samples here showing off how they handle it in EPUB2, and EPUB3 (with Javascript):
http://www.doppeltext.com/en/bilingu...german-english
From one of their EPUB2 samples, it looks like they use this code:
Quote:
<p class="src" id="t3"><a href="#s3">fand er sich</a> in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.</p>
<p class="trans">he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.</p>
[....]
<div class="sp noindent">
<span id="s2"><span class="dropcap"><span><a href="#t2">A</a></span></span><span class="firstword outdent"><a href="#t2">LS</a></span> <a href="#t2">Gregor</a> Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte,</span> <span id="s3"><a href="#t3">fand er sich</a> in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.</span> <span id="s4"><a href="#t4">Er lag auf</a> seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch,</span> <span id="s5"><a href="#t5">auf dessen</a> Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte.</span> <span id="s6"><a href="#t6">Seine vielen</a>, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.</span>
</div>
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- Top Half of file
- Text is broken into readable chunks ("sentences"), with translation below offset in a blockquote looking format.
- Each "sentence" is given a unique ID.
- Bottom Half of file
- Have the text in its entirety in foreign language
- Has clickable links back to every translated sentence above.
I could have SWORN I saw an example on AZARDI/Readium's site (as Hitch mentioned). I went looking for it and of course I can't find it again... I hate when I lose examples in the abyss!
If I recall correctly, there were EPUB3 examples of the side-by-side "table" looking ones, and then others were clickable with translated bubbles (I assume all done with javascript). But again, these MUST be read on PC (or large tablet), and you will then be limited to very few reading programs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmikel
It makes my current project of transcribing a PDF with half page footnotes look like a walk in the park.
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Indeed... dual-language books are definitely one of the really tough projects, and the type of books that just isn't suited well for the current generation of ebook formats.
I wouldn't want to touch it if the source was from a PDF scan. If it is an extremely clean DOC or HTML source, perhaps it might not be TOO bad (just very labor intensive creating all those links back/forth, and breaking text apart).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I don't know how it can be done, in any realistic (and affordable) way, for ePUB2 and the existing available readers, even iBooks. Sorry to be a downer, but...I just don't see it working, given everything (unless you do the entire book as fixed-format. THAT, of course, would work).
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I definitely don't see any way of handling this affordably.
I actually have a Firefox tab open (I believe it has been sitting there for more than a year
), with a few books/white papers talking about different methods of programming "Bitext Alignment". Quite an interesting topic. I was thinking there is probably some mass semi-automated way to translate digital texts (think UN documents).
There may be some dedicated translation programs out there that help create such multi-language files... although their price is probably outrageous. (Because they have very specialized dictionaries, to help translate entire phrases, would be used by huge multi-national corporations + governments).
I don't know enough about the translation side of things to know which tools translators actually use... I only researched the programming side of aligning texts for a few days, and haven't touched it since.