Show HN: Practice foreign languages with books (parallel translation and speech) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Practice foreign languages with books (parallel translation and speech)

paralleltext.io

10 pointsmstipetic5 comments

I like this idea a lot, but it's somewhat difficult to use when you have to flip back and forth in a sentence to connect parts of it together especially since a lot of languages cannot be translated word for word. It would be nice to see both the sentence and translation at the same time, maybe in a sidebar or a tooltip that hovers above the sentence with the translation. But this is something that I really enjoy using in conjunction with something like duo lingo.

Thanks! I've gotten mixed requests for both split view and current view. I'm working on adding a split view option. Please let me know if you have any other feedback

One suggestion I have is to be able to select multiple sentences and flip them, or break the text into sections and show the target language text on the opposing "page."

The reason I suggest this is because many non-Romance and non-Germanic languages are not and cannot be translated 1:1 to English, so the sentence and paragraph structures will be different.

Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version.

That's why I didn't want to put a direct translation, the versions supplied are the original translations, so you can understand the meaning of the sentence from context.

> Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version.

Right now, they're per-sentence, as far as I can tell (though I haven't looked very much); I haven't seen any multi-sentence passages (paragraphs) that I can convert all at once.

As an example, I was thinking of something like:

Translation: "Sentence A. Sentence B. Sentence C."

Original: "Sentence B, part of A. Sentence A remainder. Sentence C."

In that case, clicking the convert arrow for Sentence B in the translation won't give you anything useful for Sentence B.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com