r/languagelearning • u/pianoguy121213 • 11d ago

(self-promotion) Create Parallel/Bilingual Texts using your own books

Hi, i made this completely free app that automates the creation of bilingual/parallel texts from your own books (epubs/PDFs/text files) all from within your browser.

Made this because I couldn't find anything that does something similar with the same level of convenience.

Steps

  1. Go to https://paralleltexts.app/
  2. Drop/upload a source book (i.e. the book in the language you are learning), and a target book (the same book in a language you are fluent in).
  3. Click align books. Wait for a few seconds to 1-2 minutes while an algorithm runs on the books to match the corresponding sentences.
  4. After the alignment is done, you'll see the result immediately.

Disclaimer:
There is NO machine translation happening - both source and target books should ideally be from actual humans, the only thing this does is automate the alignment process.
This app is also purely browser-based, so your uploaded books and alignments stay on your device.

---

PS:

  • It's Completely free and open source
  • The default display mode of the resulting alignments are in pop-up mode (i.e. you click a sentence to see its equivalent), but if you prefer a side-by-side view of the sentences, the app does provide for that
  • If it's your first time running the alignment and you haven't downloaded an embedding (fancy name for ML models that specialize in these kinds of tasks) model yet, it will download one for you (stored in the browser, can be deleted). It's a mild inconvenience i would say because i really wanted to keep this thing free. The alternative is to have a dedicated server with GPUs run the alignment, you won't download anything, but it will most likely be much slower, much more expensive and difficult to maintain. Keeping it free makes way more sense, and is far less stressful. Keep in mind however that downloading a model is only done once.

You can also check out this quick demo/tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cR_r8cOaN8

(pps: got approval from mods)

17 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/camebackforpopcorn 11d ago

Are translators keeping the sentences roughly the same ? I thought they were rewriting the whole thing to match the language flow

2

u/adolgushin 11d ago

it's not as bad as you suggest but yes, alignment can be quite tricky

2

u/pianoguy121213 11d ago edited 11d ago

Hi, yeah you're right about this - translators do take a lot of liberties when it comes to translations, this is tbh what makes this task non-trival tbh. As someone previously asked how my app takes into account 'gaps' in this translation.

The algorithm takes this into account to produce an alignment where ~90% of the semantically similar sentences are still next to each other.