Have they ever thought of experimenting with putting translations above or below the words similar to the way LIngQ adds pronunciation for non latin scripts? This seems like it would make reading text quite painless. And you could remove it once you knew the word just like you can remove the pronunciation help.
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Such a feature might be especially helpful for beginners and even more so for target languages which are grammatically quite different from ones mother tongue. More experienced users might enjoy that they could see a translation right above or below the text.
An example might look like this:
(This example shows an additional middle row which we may ignore for this discussion).
However, there are some challanges to create this automatically, for example:
- which of the meanings shall be shown (words might have different meanings)
- translations should be reasonable short for the spacing to work
- what to do with words that have no direct expressions in other languages? (in the example I have kept them in grey; leaving them blanc might also work)
- making such a feature not only available for English but other languages as well might bring additional challanges
AI could produce such a word-by-word translation and some people would need to check the quality before implementation.
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Great idea guys, I am working on this for the Rooster Tools now
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You explained the idea a lot better than me - and the sample looks great. I’ve thought this would be a good idea for a while but took it up again when I was watching a YouTuber’s video 32:54 Now playing Watch later Add to queue HOW I READ MY FIRST BOOK IN JAPANESEon how she read her first book in Japanese. (Interesting that your example is also in Japanese). Of course it made me think back to when I first started learning Japanese and how HARD it was in large part because of the grammar. But writing the English above the words helped me a lot. I only did it for my Japanese homework but she wrote the English (or maybe her native language I’m not sure) next to the new words throughout the whole book. Well, almost. I think for repeat words she didn’t bother but man she wrote a lot in that book. But I think it would be nice even as I get better in the language. As long as you can turn it off for known words.
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I think having AI do legwork would be great but I’d also want to be able to override it and type in my own quick and dirty translation as well.
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It’s crazy how I put an idea out there thinking it will be shot down by the powers that be but instead you reply that you’ll get to work on it for your add on right away.
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The word-by-word translation seems like a natural thing to do. Creating it yourself is a good excercise but can take time (I used to do about 30 korean mini-stories (part A) like that + 19 in Chinese + a few in Greek and Japanese).
For Spanish I had an old DVD Beginner Course which used that method. That was convenient, but such courses are not widely available. AI could be a game changer though.
I like your idea of combining AI translations with the option to adjust these yourself.
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Yes this can be a good idea for beginners, as long as it’s possible to turn it on and off.
There also is value in adding the translation on top of the sentences yourself. We can’t do it on the website or app, but LingQ also allows to print lessons so we could do it manually on paper (not for absolute beginners maybe). There also are bilingual books called interlinear books that follow this principle for learning new languages (see here: https://interlinearbooks.com/ , just as an example, not sponsoring the website). This is a method also recommended by polyglot Luca Lampariello (blog post: https://www.lucalampariello.com/create-interlinear-texts/ and youtube video about it: https://youtu.be/bkImCF6qihU?si=Hrd5Izbaz5WGgLo5. Luca also advocates his bidirectional translation method, that suggests to translate A → B and B → A from one language to another and vice versa as an efficient learning method for foreign languages: https://youtu.be/ERD05x0JWoI?si=594_WgANiYWbZGGa .
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Very nice idea!
I had the same thought while learning Greek. Since every word in a sentence has a corresponding translation, why not showing it next to the word, instead of scrolling up and down or clicking on a word.
I definitely support this idea. I hope it can be implemented easily.
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