Quick language learning tip.
You can create parallel bilingual texts using HTML iframe. Here’s some examples:
Don Quixote in English and Spanish
What is to be Done? in English and Russian
Here’s the code (do NOT copy and paste any code without knowing HTML):
code
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8"/>
<title>Bilingual Don Quixote</title>
</head>
<body>
<iframe
id="frame1"
title="Inline Frame Example"
src="./EN_DON_QUIXOTE/index.html" <!-- Insert L1 text -->
style="height: 98vh; width: 88ch"
></iframe>
<iframe
id="frame2"
title="Inline Frame Example"
src="./ES_DON_QUIXOTE/index.html" <!-- Insert L2 text -->
style="height: 98vh; width: 88ch"
></iframe>
</body>
</html>
Note that this doesn’t work if you haven’t downloaded the HTML files. src="marxists.org/... didn’t work for me unless I disable a security option on my browser, which I won’t do.
I still don’t know how to do this trick with texts that have different vertical orientations (most European languages are written left to right, while Mongolian and some East Asian texts are written top to bottom).
It’s a bit annoying to make both documents look “similar” (you can see that I messed up the Russian-English example), but if you know a bit of css and html it can be done.
Or you can just reduce the size of the window of your browser and place two windows side by side. But where’s the fun in that?
Also, I’ve spent like 3 days trying to parse these two files with spaCy to make a polyglot document and missed this fucking obvious solution. Do not make my mistake lmao.
This is besides the point, but those are crazy texts for learning a new language. Shouldn’t the starting point be like, Dr. Seuss or something? I can barely understand half of the nouns in that first paragraph of Don Quixote lol
Yes they are lol.
It’s just that they are on public domain and I spent like 3 days with Don Quixote specifically trying to align it with its translation. Then I finally realized “oh shit this is hard to read”.
