Multilingual parallel app (Paralelus)

[Paralelus]

Hello there,

I have another account in this forum, but I've created this one specifically for the Paralelus app, which is a creation of my own.

I always liked the concept of bilingual (or multilingual) learning, i.e., reading a text in my target language and switching to another one in order to grasp the meaning of some unknown word or phrase.

As I'm a developer, I've created the Paralelus app, entirely free, available only in the Play Store (Android) for now, but I'm also working on an IoS version. Your feedback would be so much valuable, so I thank you all in advance!

I hope I'm not breaking any rules announcing this app here, as I think it's very useful for us, language learners, and it's the first time I create something (an app) with the concept of "eating your own dog's food", as I will be definetely an active user of it and keep on upgrading it.

With the Paralelus app the user can read multilingual books in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Esperanto. With one swipe you can change from one language to another one, making it easy to understand the texts in your target language. You can also use it as a tool to understand different languages in the same context. Books currently available: The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, The Fall of the House of Usher, TED Talks, common words and phrases extracted from movies, the Bible and more.




Regards,

[mcthulhu]

Could you clarify what it does? Does it align two versions of any book? Or do the books have to be provided by you and pre-aligned on your Web site?

[mcthulhu]

Never mind, I went ahead and installed it and I see what it does now. I like the idea and the user interface; it seems very easy to use. Nice job! A larger selection of books would be good; I was only able to open two of them, though at least they are books I like.

If you haven't already seen it, you might take a look at https://farkastranslations.com/bilingual_books.php as a data source. Farkas has parallel translations of many classic books already aligned in an HTML table format, one language per column, which is very easy to extract parallel texts from. See his note on bulk downloading and dissemination, however. The set of languages for each book varies (Hungarian is naturally common, since the Web site is in Hungary); I don't know whether your app can handle a varying number of languages flexibly or not.

[Stefan]

I would recommend updating your post with a few screenshots and info on how it works and what makes it different.

[Paralelus]

Thank you for you valuable feedback.

I've updated the post, as requested (waiting for moderator approval). I was so excited about publishing the app, that I forgot to describe what it actually does.

About Farkas translations, it is indeed a good resource for aligned translations, but I feel that the aligned sections are rather big there, like 15-20 sentences at once. The ideal alignment would be a 1-1 sentence. Sometimes it's not possible, as the translation of 1 sentence in a language turns out to be 2-3 sentences in other languages. Sometimes the ordering of phrases is also inverted. But it's almost always possible to make small alignments.