Exceptional Texts On The Multilingual Web

Great writers help keep a language efficient for discourse of all kinds. In doing so they produce exceptional texts which may defy Statistical Machine Translation by employing uncommon idiom. Such “turns of phrase” can enter into a Nation’s collective memory and form the basis from which compassion and conviction are conveyed during important national discourse. Communities that unite across language barriers have no such robust basis for discourse. Here we describe a Multilingual Web prototype application that promotes appreciation of exceptional texts by non-native readers. The application allows dual column original/translation texts (in Open Office format) to be imported into the translator’s browser, to be manually aligned for semantic correspondence, to be aligned with an audio reading, and then saved as HTML5 for subsequent presentation to non-native readers. We hope to provide a new way of experiencing exceptional texts (poetry, here) that transmits their significance without incurring extraneous distraction. We motivate, outline and illustrate our application in action.