Parsing ebooks/articles with common abbreviations

Support & Feedback Forum
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1

I am still a little new to the platform, but the primary value I’m getting is importing ebooks and YouTube videos in my target language.

I just imported an ebook, and every time there’s a Sr. or Sra. (equivalent of Mr. or Mrs. in English) it interprets the period as the end of the sentence. Editing and deleting these fragmented sentences manually takes quite a while.

Example Sentence:

  1. O Sr. e a Sra. Dursley, da rua dos Alfeneiros, no 4, se orgulhavam de dizer que eram perfeitamente normais, muito bem, obrigado.

Imports to LingQ as:

  1. O Sr.
  2. e a Sra.
  3. Dursley, da rua dos Alfeneiros, no 4, se orgulhavam de dizer que eram perfeitamente normais, muito bem, obrigado.

I hope that makes the issue clear. I just corrected about the first hundred paragraphs of Harry Potter “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley” issues, and now I’m realizing the book starts abbreviating Professor as “Prof.” so I’m just throwing in the towel and praying for an automated solution.

Is there a feature I’m missing to find/replace abbreviations? What are my options, I’m not looking forward to doing this manually for everything I import.

Thanks for your help!

1 Like
2

I’ve loaded several Harry Potter books in Spanish to Lingq and didn’t remember this problem, so I looked and my Complete Collection that I purchased on Amazon doesn’t abbreviate titles such as these. However, I can certainly believe that some editors or other languages like Portuguese would routinely do these abbreviations and it would be a pain.

Until the team has time to address this issue (if they even can), a workaround would be to copy the text of the book into Word or some other editor and perform a search/replace to exchange them for the fully spelled-out title.

Then you can either copy each chapter into it’s own lesson or you can import the entire word document into a course.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your response; that was the response I was dreading. I’ll trudge along until it becomes too much of an issue, then I’ll decide if it’s worth editing and re-importing everything.

4

It shouldn’t take that much time at all. The free Calibre book organizer will convert an ebook to a Word document. Just load that into Word, delete the pages other than the chapters, then search and replace the contractions and load the Word document to LingQ. It should take about 15 mins if you already have Calibre.