I have exactly the same problem with relating the the layout of English and French translation while reading. I suppose you can look at it from another way. If you have to constantly refer to the translation every time you read a few lines then it actually slows down you ability to grasp the text as a whole. It also gives you one interpretion of the original text thus preventing you from making your own personal interpretion. Reading and translating the text is like working out a cross-word puzzle. You have to do quite a bit of guessing, Even an expert translator would know that with the wide range of synonyms available for each word he has to make a very personal choice of what would be the best word to use w hich may not be to everyones taste. Gussing is not some hapzard, random attempt to get to the truth. An excellent book on how to teach children reading skills says the we should bear three things in mind. One: what is the subject being discussed. Two: What are the words before the one which is not understood and third: what comes soon after. In fact we are guessing all ther time even when we read in our own language. To that I will add another tip. Read the whole passage f i r st. The word or phase may appear again and this time in a more explicit form. That is what reading is all about.
This is a very interesting subject and I would be interested in hearing other views.
Finally : the harder we try to guess what a word in French means, the longer we are likely to remember it. It may pay in the long run to look up a dictionary first. And then write out the entire sentence as we see it. Finally we can check our translation with the one in the book.
At the moment a small group of us are working on translating those articles in the archive of La Guinguette which do not have a translation into English. There are 98 available, and we have now completed 27 and have 5 more in preparation. You can find the index of those which have been done, or are in progress, here: http://www.alistairmills.com/French/LaGuinguette/index.html
If you would like to contribute, tell me which one you are willing to do and I shall update the index to show that it is on its way.
As for publishing the text so that the French and English are better aligned, that is something which has to be discussed with Richard. I will discuss this with him at a suitable time.
Thanks for this feedback, it's always very helpful. The problem concerning text alignment is somewhat technical. The articles in La Guinguette use the "divs" method of page layout, rather than the more traditional tables method. When a reader "reveals" the translation, they are revealing a block of hidden text, known in the jargon as a div.
The difficulty is that in HTML one "div" does not automatically know how long another one is (unlike two cells of a table, which automatically stay the same height). What we do is to add in a little space here and there to make the texts roughly parallel, but it is a little approximative as you are pointing out.
We are looking at solutions for this, but it's not proving easy; if there are any HTML wizards out there who have a neat answer to automatise a solution, we'd be extremely grateful to hear it.
I was pleased to see this thread because I too find the misaligned translations annoying. The information about the html code was helpful and got me thinking about the problem. Then I couldn't stop thinking about it... it's the former programmer in me, I guess.
Anyway, I am by no means an HTML wizard, but it seems unlikely that you'll find a solution if you are determined to stick with the div approach. Aligning blocks of text, such as is so helpful in a side-by-side translation, seems to me to be an excellent use of the table feature - I wonder why it isn't being used?
I experimented on the source code of one of the February articles and I found a solution by putting the text in a table and adding a javascript function to turn the English column on and off. I think it looks great and works like a charm, but the question is, will it work for you?
I am interested in looking at your solution. For the translation project I have a solution which uses tables. You can see the index at the following address:
