Just a developer-friendly tool for reading texts in foreign languages and improving reader's vocabulary.
It's still quite an early alpha, more like a proof of concept and some raw material for others to experiment on. But if you are a web developer and happen to be learning some foreign languages, you may find it quite useful already.
Live demo is available at http://dolmetsch.gbezyuk.ru
There's currently a just a simple vanilla HTML/CSS/JS draft implementation.
It requires only a static HTTP server to run (node-based http-server would do locally) and supports:
- parsing a piece of text into words, handling punctuation and numbers separately
- reader mode, where user can click on the words to see/edit translations
- vocabulary mode, where translations can be viewed all at once and edited if necessary
- vocabulary export mode (JSON)
- localStorage persistency
In order to illustrate the approach, I use first two pages of the German translation of the amazing "Sapiens" by truly brilliant Yuval Noah Harari. Translation target languages are English and Russian.
- Fullstops layout is buggy and to be fixed. It may require changing the layout approach.
- Words are now considered "as is" (all lowercase, though), showing no care for inflections. Thus, caring more about grammar is an obvious field for improvement.
- Speaking of grammar, one particularly interesting case would be German detachable prefixes: "aussagen -> ich sage aus".
- It's not enough just to record the words into a personal vocabulary. One needs to do reviews and test oneself. So, tools of this sort are also coming.
- Audio. Quite a separate topic. Some YouTube etc. integration also lurks in this corner.
- Support for other languages.
- Generally speaking, product-quality.