
Apply HN: paralleltext.io – Learn languages by reading - mstipetic
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paralleltext.io enables a simple way of learning languages by reading and listening human translated books in parallel.<p>Problem: Learning languages is a difficult process that requires hard work no matter if you choose the academic way or to use existing apps. It also requires continuity, a key factor which is hard to achieve with the available methods.<p>Solution: We want to change that by combining the learning experience with the pleasure of reading and listening to a book. A large number of book translations is available, but we think they&#x27;re being underutilized for this purpose.<p>Progress: We built a tool that matches human translated paragraphs from ebooks in all European languages and a novel interface to read them. Now we are focusing on adding more books and more engaging features.<p>Market: Language learning and publishing<p>Team: We are two developers, both with product management experience living in Berlin.<p>Feedback: we got amazing feedback so far (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;InternetIsBeautiful&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3x2tux&#x2F;paralleltextio_improve_your_knowledge_of_foreign&#x2F;)
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xiaopingguo
I'm hugely in favor of graded sentence level translations especially for adult
language learners. It is a more natural form of spaced repetition and requires
much less will power to stick with it. Finding decent suitable corpora is the
difficult part but very amenable to crowd sourcing efforts.

Also see this link for why reading is a really good way to acquire language:
[http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/mcquillan/default.html](http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/mcquillan/default.html)

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mstipetic
Sorry, what do you mean by "graded sentence level translations?"

Also, this article is really supportive of our project, thanks!

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xiaopingguo
Sentence level translations, rather than word or paragraph level, graded by
difficulty as beginner/intermediate/advanced.

You can look up more about that research from here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading)

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mstipetic
Ah, ok, now I understand. The problem might be that we aren't using machine
translated texts, but human translated. So when matching translations, often
sentences don't have a 1-to-1 matching. Translators often change sentence
structure to better suite the new language (there are even instances of
translators adding new characters in the book).

In any case, it's a very interesting problem

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tgflynn
I think it would be great if there were a way to mouse-over a word and get a
popup with the word's translation and information like part of speech,
conjugations, declensions, etc.

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mstipetic
Yes, we're working on it now. We have to both make it seamlessly integrated in
the interface (a popup might be too intrusive), and unfortunately the state of
open source dictionaries is not ideal (which we plan to change also).

Cheers!

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kumarski
The books you're offering up have a ridiculously difficult readability. How do
you plan to change that?

What languages will you target first and why?

I'm quadralingual as well and blog about language stuff once a year or so.
Holler at me if you want poignant feedback. I've been published on lifehacker
and other sites for my language learning tips.

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mstipetic
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

We've been so far working with books that already had some translation
metadata which we could use, but just recently we got a tool working which
does it automatically. It's still a work in progress, but we managed to put a
new book out, Siddartha by Herman Hesse in English-German combination.

We're gonna concentrate on English-German combination first, since we're in
Berlin now, and can calibrate the matching tool ourselves, but adding new
books in new languages should more or less become trivial soon.

We have a lot of features in the works, one of them being providing and
recommending books with different levels of difficulty.

Any help or feedback would be very welcome, you can always reach us at
contact@paralleltext.io

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kumarski
I highly recommend using popular short stories.

Books are far too long.

Short stories give the user a sense of success. Even just covering news
articles would be pretty solid. :)

Current events provide a lot of context.

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mstipetic
Thanks!

We might look into short stories also. News articles might be interesting
also, but sourcing multilingual new articles might be a problem. In any case,
we have a lot of work in front of us :)

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dputtick
This is a cool idea, and something I would consider using. Two questions:

\- How are you sourcing your translations, and what is your technology
solution for matching them up?

\- Do you have plans to make a native app for tablets that can store the books
locally, or are you going to move ahead with improving your web tool for now?

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mstipetic
Thanks, we think it's cool too!

The new books we're adding come from Project Gutenberg. We parse the ebooks,
and using our tool and a combination of open source technologies
([http://mokk.bme.hu/en/resources/hunalign/](http://mokk.bme.hu/en/resources/hunalign/)
for instance) we do the matching and then manually review the result, if
necessary.

We started building an app, but then realised that the interface would
basically be the same, and a lot can be accomplished with modern web
technologies. We plan to leverage local storage and to make it feel as native
as possible for now, since we have fairly limited resources and a lot of work
in front of us.

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dome82
I really like the idea!

It would be nice to have features like the one in ReadLang where I can click
on multiple words and get them translated. I like the part where I can listen
the sentences.

Are you going to apply this to any article on the web? What will be the
business model of your service?

Good luck!!

(P.S: In Norway, we have a similar site that translate the news. Here it is an
example and hope it can be useful to you:
[http://www.klartale.no/kultur/kunne-aldri-v%C3%A6rt-
forfatte...](http://www.klartale.no/kultur/kunne-aldri-v%C3%A6rt-
forfatter-1.709691))

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mstipetic
Thanks!

The thing is, these aren't automatically translated books, we're matching real
book translations, so at least our approach isn't applicable to articles
online.

We have a lot of features planned, from word lookup, to hooking them up to
real audiobooks, and a lot more.

Our motto is "Provide maximum good" so we don't want premium-only features,
and all the books in the public domain would always be free, but as our
business model, we'd like to offer recent, in copyright books in this format
for sale.

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astrange
This is a good idea. What makes it a startup and not just an app? What would
you reinvest the revenue in?

BTW, the only book posted for English to Swedish has a pretty literary
translation and long sentences, so it's hard to learn anything from it.

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mstipetic
Thanks!

Well our business model would be recent, in-copyright books in this format.
For instance, reading Harry Potter in this interface is something we could
imagine being useful. Other than that, we think this tool might be useful in
the education system, we can provide a lot of added value there.

Some language combinations are unfortunately underrepresented, but we've just
built a tool that matches translations automatically, so that should change
soon. Currently we are focusing on English-German combination since that's
what we can check manually while we work out the kinks in the tool, and then
we will spread out to other languages.

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orangetabbycat
This is so great.

I wish there was a way to translate individual words rather than entire
paragraphs.

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mstipetic
Thanks!

We're working on adding individual word lookup right now, we should be rolling
it out soon.

