Creating parallel text with Microsoft word or Nova Text Aligner

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mentecuerpo
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Creating parallel text with Microsoft word or Nova Text Aligner

Postby mentecuerpo » Sun May 16, 2021 2:11 am

You can create a parallel text using Microsoft word, and then you can play the sound using Microsoft text to speech. You can also see the machine translation using Microsoft word translate features.

This way, you learn new words as you read effortlessly, and you can listen to the correct pronunciation the the "read at loud" feature.

To create the parallel text will need a word table with two columns. On the first column, paste the text on a language you know well; on the second column, paste the text of your target language. If you are an advanced learner, paste the other way around.

If working with word tables difficult, you can use Nova Text Aligner to get the job done.
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mentecuerpo
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Re: Creating parallel text with Microsoft word or Nova Text Aligner

Postby mentecuerpo » Sun May 16, 2021 5:14 am

The speaker at the Polyglot Conference in Berlin in the year 2015, explains a way to do it. It is a slow video but it gets the job done.

How to Create Bilingual Books and Use Them for Your Language Learning [EN] - R. Kokorin PG 2016
https://youtu.be/NRicly5lb10

However, in the last part of the youtube video, the software he mentions, ABBYY Aligner 2.0, is no longer on sale or supported by ABBYY.
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Re: Creating parallel text with Microsoft word or Nova Text Aligner

Postby Iversen » Sun May 16, 2021 4:53 pm

I make all my bilingual texts with tables in MSWord plus Google translate (or by copying passages from humanmade bilingual texts). The length of the text in each language can be fine-tuned by moving the middle line or changing the font size, and therefore I don't see the need to spend one row per sentence - it is enough to get the paragraphs roughly aligned in some very high columns (about one page in length). And then I translate as much text as Google Translate can cope with in one go and insert the original to the left and the translation to the right with as little text formating as possible. This also means that I can't see the advantage in using special software to do the trick.

Of course it would take a long time to do this for a whole book, but for intensive study a few pages suffice. For extensive studies it's probably enough to align whole pages - but to do the aligning you have to be able to find the parallel passages. However I don't see this as a major obstacle since you already have to be somewhat experienced to get anything from extensive text perousals.

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Readini
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Re: Creating parallel text with Microsoft word or Nova Text Aligner

Postby Readini » Mon Aug 09, 2021 10:08 am

Hi Guys, would you be interested in having an online tool for automatic alignment with possibility for manual corrections?
I'm working on the webapp for bilingual books (readini.com) which does exactly that and thinking about providing such tool for the users to create their own bilingual content.
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