Recreational research into Feudal Japan
Paralyze
I’ve been a bit busy with mysterious activities this weekend, so I thought I’d give you a quick glimpse of a new project I’ve been working on: Paralyze. It presents the translation of a text alongside the original and shows you how they relate by letting you mouse over a bit of text and highlighting the corresponding part of the other versions. For an example, here’s a translation of the Hideyoshi waka this blog is named after:
Original
奥山に
紅葉ふみわけ
なく蛍
Transliteration
Okuyama ni
Momiji fumiwake
Naku hotaru
English
In the deep mountains
Push through the red leaves
Fireflies sing
Eventually, Paralyze will also serve as a primary source repository and classical Japanese dictionary. But for now, I have some sleep to catch on.
Comments are closed.
January 18, 2010 - 4:40 pm
Neat! That seems like a really useful tool.
Someone once described Japanese to me as a stack-based language. At least from the above sample that seems pretty accurate.
January 24, 2010 - 3:37 pm
Yeah, when I was learning Postscript in Japan during my MISTI internship, the similarities really struck me.
January 24, 2010 - 3:14 pm
Neat. I’ve always liked how Google Translate does a similar thing, where you mouse over a bit of translated text and it shows you the original.
What is your (planned?) data source for the translations and the correspondences between words and phrases in English and in Japanese? Do you plan to enter everything yourself, or to attempt to crowdsource it, or is there some curated source out there for classical Japanese texts with correspondences in English?
January 24, 2010 - 3:36 pm
This is mostly intended to be my own work; the original motivator was to give me a tool do do my own translations less lossily than just writing out the translation. If I found an appropriately-licensed or out-of-copyright body of translations, I might reverse-engineer the correspondences, though. I doubt there’s something good, free, and pre-annotated in my area of interest. I’m certainly open to other people contributing if there’s interest, though.
I never noticed that Google Translate does this; I guess it’s my fault for sticking with Babelfish.
January 25, 2010 - 3:45 am
Makes sense. I’d suggest leaving the site open for other people to add translations, through whatever tools you use to enter translations yourself — if others with the same interests (and qualifications!) stop by, it opens more of a door for them to interact with you, even though it’s not where you mostly imagine the data coming from.
And you should definitely try out Google Translate! Babelfish is pretty good for languages like French, but it’s always been awful for e.g. Chinese. So I was blown away by the quality of Google Translate’s Chinese->English translation when they first started offering that from their own statistical methods circa 2006. It’s still terrible =), but it’s a lot better — often good enough to read through. Google Translate uses SYSTRAN, the same engine as Babelfish, on the languages where they don’t find their own software is a lot better. Maybe you can tell me how the Japanese translation compares.
January 25, 2010 - 5:46 pm
I’ve described the current interface as “It’s pretty unintuitive unless you’re me, but once you become me, it’s easy to use.” I will open it up once I get around to making it secure to have untrusted users.
Also, note that I’m not actually qualified in this area. Just energetic about it.
Yeah, I should look at sometime. It’s been a while since I’ve used any electronic translator for Japanese; I mostly just use Babelfish for Mystery Hunt puzzles and to figure out German APIs at work.