Bilingual Viewer: A bilingual text generation tool

Abstract

This article describes the website BilingualViewer.com; it discusses the technologies used to build it and the engineering challenges that were encountered. BilingualViewer.Com is an open and free application that uses web technologies to create Bilingual versions of articles and books. The website can be saved onto the homepage of a smartphone and used like an App (for reading and converting newspaper articles on the fly), in addition to being opened on a computer's browser to process intensive tasks such as whole book translations. The website will henceforth be referred to as the app. Bilingual text refers here to a piece of writing where sentences in two different languages are presented sequentially, one sentence in the language to be learned followed by the user's primary language. Bilingual texts are particularly useful for students who rely heavily on dictionaries when reading books and newspaper articles.The app helps to create bilingual texts from almost any electronic content. A key feature from a copyright point of view is that the content is generated and stored locally on the device (unless added to an online library). Where a subscription is required to access newspaper content, the app generates a bilingual text article and stores it locally, so that the restricted content does not leave the device (i.e., it does not appear in any cloud server other than Google or Apple translation servers). There is a large features list including switching on and off languages, getting the device to read out loud, saving a list of items on the device along with the currently read position, sending content to an eBook, merging articles and more. A library of pre-translated books is provided in the app with the option of augmenting this with the user’s own on-line content. The app is available at https://www.bilingualviewer.com/ Documentation on the app can be found at hhtps://bv-fc.netlify.app/about/