Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

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ralfw
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:32 pm
Languages: German (mother tongue), English (very fluent), Russian (some), Japanese (some); trying to learn Bulgarian.
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Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

Postby ralfw » Mon Oct 11, 2021 5:00 pm

Interlinear texts, more specifically Birkenbihl texts appeal to me. Unfortunately their number is not large. And they are missing in the language I'm trying to learn (Bulgarian).

Hence I set out to create a software to generate more of them. Automatically! The software takes a text in a source language (eg. French or Bulgarian) and translates it into a target language (eg English) and renders it as a Birkenbihl text which consists of these parts:

1. Each paragraph of the source language text is matched with...
2. ...its translation into the target language.
3. Also the source language paragraph is transformed from text to voice and can be listened to.
4. Finally each source language paragraph is presented word-by-word with...
5. ...word-by-word translations.

Here is what that looks like:

Image

And if you want to try it out see this excerpt from Jules Verne's "Journey to the center of the earth" with source language French and target language English: https://ralfw.de/birkenbihl-method-texts/VOYAGE%20AU%20CENTRE%20DE%20LA%20TERRE/

On the "homepage" of my little project you find some more texts (Bulgarian-English): https://ralfw.de/birkenbihl-method-texts/

As you can see the software is doing is already doing its job, basically at least.

My question to you is: Do you think this is useful? Would it help language learners to have such a software available to themselves (eg as an online service: paste in your source language text and get a Birkenbihl text back). Or could that help to particularly motivated people to produce Birkenbihl texts for the community?

There sure have to be made some improvements. Whatever the online translation engines produce the software cannot control. But what to feed them could be controlled in a more fine grained manner. Example: Some words in a source language should not be separated in a word-by-word presentation/translation. How to denote that in the source text? Or how to provide idiomatic translations for words/phrases?

Currently everything is happening automatically. But with some manual intervention, ie. text "polishing", the quality of the translations could be improved, I guess.

What do you think? Any ideas?
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Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
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Re: Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

Postby Kraut » Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:12 pm

DeepL now translates also into Bulgarian.
https://app.elreader.com/ does the job of interlinear translations with text-to-speech voices nicely already.
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ralfw
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:32 pm
Languages: German (mother tongue), English (very fluent), Russian (some), Japanese (some); trying to learn Bulgarian.
x 4

Re: Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

Postby ralfw » Tue Oct 12, 2021 2:13 pm

Thanks, @kraut, for pointing me to elreader. That's a promising service. The transcription is immediate, which is great. I like the epub upload feature. Support for vocabulary learning is a great idea!

However:
- limited in language selection
- translation is not through DeepL, it seems, which makes it less good than it could be
- no word-by-word juxtaposition with translations
- no flash cards with spaced repetition learning so far

My software already uses DeepL to translate paragraphs; that's why there are samples in Bulgarian on the homepage.
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Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

Postby Kraut » Tue Oct 12, 2021 5:44 pm

ralfw wrote:Thanks, @kraut, for pointing me to elreader. That's a promising service. The transcription is immediate, which is great. I like the epub upload feature. Support for vocabulary learning is a great idea!

However:
- limited in language selection
- translation is not through DeepL, it seems, which makes it less good than it could be
- no word-by-word juxtaposition with translations
- no flash cards with spaced repetition learning so far

My software already uses DeepL to translate paragraphs; that's why there are samples in Bulgarian on the homepage.



I think elreader also uses DeepL (they say it somewhere in their blog). But they will probably never include Bulgarian or Lithuanian, which is my favourite. The plus of your tool is the Birkenbihl feature, the word-by-word juxtaposition, the word being the basic meaning/literal translation of the text. It is useful for beginners with no clue because of the foreign script or completely intransparent vocabulary.
Birkenbihl was not the first to use it:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methode_T ... genscheidt
Lithuanian - a minority language in Germany before th war - has no strict word order nor transparent vocabulary, word-by-word juxtaposition would be very helpful.
https://interlinearbooks.com/lithuanian/
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ralfw
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:32 pm
Languages: German (mother tongue), English (very fluent), Russian (some), Japanese (some); trying to learn Bulgarian.
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Re: Generating Birkenbihl texts automatically

Postby ralfw » Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:09 am

Here's an example I produced for Lithuanian: https://ralfw.de/birkenbihl-method-texts/The%20Art%20of%20Love/ It's an excerpt from "The Art of Love" by Erich From. (All I could find in Lithuanian. Sorry.)

The quality of the paragraph translation is good, I think. That's thanks to DeepL.

The word-by-word translation, though, is lacking. That's done by Google which at least for Bulgarian usually delivers better results than DeepL for single words.

But it may depend on how the source text is prepared. It might be that some Lithuanian words should not be translated separately. Like in German: "sich freuen" can be translated as "sich" and "freuen" separately, but I'd say it makes more sense to keep both together. In my software that can be signified with a '_' to separate words instead of a space ' '. But for that one would have to know where and when it makes sense in a source language.
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