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Bilingual books in wiki format

Hello dear colleagues and residents of Habrahabr.

We all know that one of the best ways to saturate your brain with a foreign language is to read famous works of art in the language you are learning, comprehending, so to speak, “the language from the creators”.

But when reading books in a non-native language, a number of difficulties usually arise. Of course, we do not know all the words in the new text and we want to know their meaning. We have to be distracted by the search in the dictionary. This greatly reduces the speed of reading, often leads to the loss of the plot and, in general, the pleasure of reading.
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Not satisfied with the existing parallel translation systems, I decided to make a simple extension for MediaWiki, allowing you to write the original text and the translation in one sentence, inserting the translation injections into an arbitrary place of the foreign text in the following way:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups [    : «show – showed» – ], and asked them whether the drawing frightened them [   ,     ]. 

Then, the plugin for MediaWiki replaces the contents of the square brackets with an invisible one, the text of which will be displayed when you hover over the offer with the mouse.

And when you wanted to learn about a word in more detail and learn its pronunciation, you can click on the sentence and select the word of interest in the window that appears.

Thus, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone - to remove the annoying translation in places where I already freely understand the meaning of the sentences and at the same time keep it always at hand for places where something is not clear to me.

Here you can see how it looks on the example of the fairy tale Little Prince .

So far this is the only book in this format, but I would like to create more, gradually forming the library. If it seems interesting to someone, I will be glad to hear your suggestions for improvement.

Thanks for attention!

UPD: If you have something to say, but there is no possibility to comment on Habré, then you can write on the talk page

PS: Special thanks for pluses :)

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/153179/


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