Preface:
This is not my idea, I saw another tool which does something similar, but it was not implemented as well as it could have been. Combining this idea with LRs personalized word database would be something on another level.
The idea is simple but powerful:
The idea:
When you are browsing the internet and you read any web-page, any parts of the page which would translate to a KNOWN WORD (or LEARNING WORD) in your TL (Target Language) will be replaced in the middle of the original-language sentence. For example:
Original text:
For example, if I'm learning Chinese, this sentence here might look something like this (based on my own Chinese level)
With addon:
For example, å¦ęęå¦ä¹ äøęļ¼čæäøŖå„å might look something čæę · ļ¼based on ęčŖå·±ēäøęę°“å¹³)
My Chinese is likely not accurate, but Iām sure you can see the idea. We can see color coded known/learning words and get all the usual features with LRās pop-up dictionary on mouse-over and the ability to mark the word as known/learning/donāt learn etc.
In the beginning, you will be reading original-language sentences with individual words translated. As your vocabulary grows, youāll be seeing more and more full sentences in your TL.
Challenges
The main challenge is finding effictive NLP systems to correctly handle sentence structures.
Here is my suggested approach/workflow:
-
The original language text is fully translated into the TL behind-the-scenes (the user doesnāt see it). Translating the full text helps to ensure proper context compared to translating individual words. Modern ML models are very good at this.
-
The translated text is parsed sentence-by-sentence to find groups of known/learning/unknown words and match them to the corresponding original-language text.
- If less than 50% of the TL sentenceās text is known/learning, the original-language sentence structure is used but with known/learning words shown in the TL.
- If more than 50% of the TL sentenceās text is known/learning, the TL sentence structure is used with the not-learning words shown in the original-language.
Personal Note
This could possible be a different addon compared the usual LR addon which handles video.
ā¦ the substituted word wonāt have quite the same meaning and usageā¦ you could only substitute maybe some kinds of wordsā¦ grammar gets butchered. Then againā¦ people mix languages in speech (spanglish etc.) and works well enough. Something that I would be more inclined to make: translate sites you visit into your target languageā¦ and we can annotate words you donāt know with translations below the word. Doing it in-page is potentially more ergonomic, but tricky to get right, so it works on all pages (readlang never quite worked right on all pages, I donāt think, with links etc.). Iāve been doing work with some guys recently to make better translations models available for LR, so we can features like that.
I can dig around see if thereās some existing code that could help.