Parallel texts in multiple languages

This repo contains English stories translated to (currently) Dutch, Turkish and Spanish.

So, why did I build this? In the first place, I dislike reading grammar books. Second, I find the stories in most language learners books very boring, so boring in fact that I hate to read them twice, let alone multiple times. However, I don't mind reading a good story multiple times, and studying a language in the mean time. Third, memorizing words in a new language becomes, for me at least, much easier when they are used right away in a story; these words acquire meaning in the context.

In case you like to add a language, or otherwise contribute to this project let me know. The idea is to take the English stories as leading, and translate those stories to a target language, in my case Dutch. Mind that the target audience is a language learner. Thus, the sentences in the target language 1) should be natural to a native speaker, 2) but at the same time, try to stay as close as possible to the English source, both in word sequence as in meaning. If you deviate too much from the English original, it will often become too hard to understand for somebody new to the language. Of course, in general it is impossible to translate the English in a one-to-one way to a target language. However, we should aim for it at least.

The structure is of the repo like this:

• The pdf files with the dual language texts can be found here.

• Sources file are here. Each source file contains one story. A file consists of sets of lines, each starting with the country code in < > signs, like so <en>, <nl>, and so on.

• config.py contains the source files you want to include.

Then there is an example file dutch_english.tex to make dutch-english parallel file. This contains some python code, make_columns.py that is run by pythontex to read the source files and put it in an a two column file. To make a file you should run pdflatex first, then pythontex, and then pdflatex again. Check the docs on pythontex; it's really useful.

An interesting extension would be to read the stories (by a native) and record them (with your mobile) to mp3, and share the mp3. Like this, one can first read and study a story, and then later listen to it, while biking to work, hanging out the wash, or something similar.