Open danakaufhold opened 6 years ago
richiebful
commented
6 years ago It looks like you've made a fair bit of progress with marking up the original text. I'm curious how your group is going to show the "reading view" of the text. It would be really cool to have a double paned window that scrolls the translation along with the original. Then you could highlight certain phenomena (parody, absurd words, and rhyme) in each text, showing how they differ.
djbpitt
commented
6 years ago How should we think about synchronizing the scrolling of uneven content? For example, if something that occupies two lines in one language occupies three in another, what does it mean to scroll them together? I don't mean to suggest that there isn't an answer to this question; the hard part, at least for me, is that there could be more than one.
One project from the first time we taught this course, in autumn 2011, synchronized specific textual positions in the versions on click (see http://www.obdurodon.org/jinni/Texts.html). The assumption was that the user would read continuously in one column, become curious at a particular moment, and click to bring the other columns into alignment. My question to myself above, though, is about continuous, smooth synchronized scrolling, which I find harder to conceptualize.
What do the rest of you think?
brucknerp
commented
6 years ago Since Japanese and English versions of the same text can have very different lengths, I'm not sure how efficient it would be to have smooth synchronized scrolling, unless it's accounted for with different font size/blank links to compensate, etc (which I wouldn't really want to do in my own project).
I think breaking the text down into smaller sections could help remove some of the length disparities. If only one paragraph has a distinctly different length between languages, then the rest of the following text will become more and more unsynchronized, but if each section is matched up, then these differences could be minimized and you could have something like "continuous, smooth scrolling".
In other news, what do you mean by "appropriate" version for the Japanese text? What makes a text inappropriate for your purposes?
danakaufhold
commented
6 years ago @richiebful @djbpitt @brucknerp Emily and I haven't yet talked about how we're going to display the translation vs. the original yet, but I like the idea of a scroll that you can line up by clicking. I also think it would be to our benefit to highlight or change the color of the text that we're analyzing so that even non-Japanese speakers would be able to see how the phrases or words correlate.
We may end up having to break our text up, because (my wording was a little off here) an "appropriate" text for us is, first and foremost, one that we can use without copyright violations. This will likely mean we end up using chunks of the text instead. @enb34 is largely in charge of finding the translation, so there may be other specific things she is looking for as well.
gmd29
commented
6 years ago It seems like scrolling would be a challenge especially because of how different the orthographies of English and Japanese are; I imagine their lengths would be quite different. I don't know how important appealing to non-Japanese speakers is to your project. But it would be interesting if you provided some sort of phonetic transcription of the nonsense words and etc. in the Japanese text since it would be difficult to understand the significance of the difference in the translations if you cannot read Japanese. This might be a lot of extra work and definitely isn't necessary, but something to consider if you have the time.
It's been a little tough to get started with translations due to our continued trouble finding an appropriate Japanese version of Alice to mark up, but nonetheless, we're still going - we even managed to fix our Git issue from last time! This week, we added some markup to the text and began to figure out our system for tagging things like nonsense words and rhymes. We plan to get our schema up to date ASAP. Additionally, we have an official space to host things on the web, so we'll be making a wire-frame for our website later this week. One other step we plan to take soon is to meet with the linguistics project coordinator and make sure that our project is up to snuff with the department's standards. For a list of what we're working on, make sure to check out our project page!