The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask

Note: This is Part 1 of the Language Learning: Japanese series; please refer to the link for other related tutorials.

The Lines-Replace Method

This entry will teach you how to make parallel texts quickly and efficiently.

A quick explanation: The main purpose and use of this method is to generate, in raw text format, a list of sentences separated by newlines. (The ‘\n’ character.)

Spreadsheet apps are able to import them with greater ease as such.

What You Will Have In Your Hands

Here’s the end result of this tutorial:

You’ll be making that yourself, with a bit of guidance from yours truly.

Content and Copyright Issues

The above is a parallel text snippet of 夢十夜 (Yume Jyuu Ya) - Ten Nights of Dreams, as penned by Natsume Souseki, the distinguished Japanese author.

I would recommend anyone who’s interested in Japanese to start off with Ten Nights of Dreams: the horror-fantasy theme the story plays with makes it a fantastic and fascinating introduction to the world of Japanese literature. (It does not use complex grammar either, so beginners should be able to cope well.)

For this tutorial, I have chosen to use Natsume Souseki, as the copyright for his works have expired. (So I’ll be safe from any legal repercussions.) However, the translations I’m using were obtained in their entirety from No-Sword; I therefore reserve and attribute full credit to him for that. (I hope the author won’t mind, as I’m not making any profit out of this exercise.)

So, visit these sites to get what you need for this tutorial: the original Japanese version of Ten Nights of Dreams. (The site, Aozora, is something like a Japanese version of Project Gutenberg.) Get the translations from No-Sword too.

You may also download the example parallel text if you like. (It’s in OpenDocument format though.)

Now, read on.

The (Twelve) Steps

My example will use the story from the First Night in its entirety. I’ve taken a lot of screen captures; so click on the links for a visual guide if you’re confused as to what you should do.

The steps outlined below may seem complicated, but really, they would take only take 5 minutes of your time to complete.

1. Select and copy (shortcut key: CTRL-V) the Japanese text. (At this point, make sure that Notepad2 is using the UTF-8 file encoding! Click File -> Encoding -> UTF-8.)

2. Fire up Notepad2. Paste what you’ve copied.

3. (EXPLANATION: Sentences in Japanese are often demarcated by the ‘ 。’ symbol. Therefore, we will use that marker as a line-ending to denote where sentences begin and end.) Open up Replace Text (shortcut key: CTRL-H), and insert the following into the empty fields:


Search String: 。
Replace With: 。\n


Make sure you don’t forget to tick the “Transform backslashes” box. Then click Replace All.

4. Now you’ve got a list of sentences, aligned nicely. However, it’s a bit messy: some sentences have blank lines in between. Not a problem. Select all text (Shortcut key: CTRL-A), then click Edit -> Block -> Remove Lines. (Shortcut key: ALT-R.)

5. Once you’ve done that, the sentences should look much cleaner. Now, select everything (shortcut key: CTRL-A) that’s present in the text file, and copy them.

6. Fire up OpenOffice Calc. Paste what you have (shortcut key: CTRL-V) in the first column/row. A new window should open, asking you to configure the character set and separator options. Unicode, the default character set should work fine; as for the separator, leave it on “Tab”. Press OK.

7. You’ve now a spreadsheet with perfectly aligned sentences, but with an ugly and jagged appearance. What we need is some formatting magic. But first, enable the use of specific fonts for Asian languages. (Click Options -> Language Settings; at the ‘Enhanced language support area’, ]tick the ‘Enabled for Asian languages’ box. Then hit OK.)

8. Now press F11. In the Styles and Formatting window, right-click ‘Default’, then click ‘Modify’. Click the tab called Fonts. Change the font under ‘Asian text font’ to something you like. (I have a bit of a preference for Meiryo myself, and would highly recommend it.) Next, click on the ‘Alignment’ tab. Select ‘Top’ from the Vertical drop-down list, and under ‘Properties’, tick the ‘wrap text automatically’ box.

9. Voila! You now have something that resembles a parallel text. But we’re only half-done.

10. Repeat steps 1-9, but use the English translation this time around. (Here are the translations from No-Sword, if you missed the link above.) Also, take note that you should use the normal period fullstop character, ‘.’, instead of ‘。’, this time around.

So:


Search String: .
Replace With: .\n


When you paste the data into the spreadsheet, take care to do so in the 2nd column.

11. At this point, you should have something that looks like this: a dual-parallel text. We’re nearly done. Now use the shortcut keys ALT-Left Arrow/ALT-Right arrow to gauge the width of the columns for both the English and Japanese language cells. (Alternatively, you could also drag the column headers.)

12. Select all cells (shortcut key: CTRL-A). Then, click ‘Format’ -> Default Formatting.

Done! All that’s left is for you to beautify the spreadsheet, just the way you like it.

Side Notes

The parallel sentences may not be nicely aligned against each other sometimes. Manual inspection and correction may be necessary.

The line-replacement method I’ve been using, as outlined above, may seem fairly obvious to some. But it would surprise you how many do not employ it, thus wasting valuable time and energy making parallel-texts manually.

Lastly, if I’ve helped you out, do let me know. And, if you’ve any tips or suggestions, please do share. Look forward to the next tutorial, which will be concerned with making kanji lists.