My idea is to enable multiple layouts for multiple translations like SAB. This would allow RAB to be used to put together multilingual books that foster multilingual education.
A challenge to this idea is that each sentence or chunk would have to be numbered in both translations for synchronization purposes, as they aren’t mapped to verse numbers like in SAB.
Admittedly, my immediate use case is trying to make a Quechua hymnal app with text synced to Quechua audio and a simultaneously-visible Spanish translation, to help me in my Quechua language learning.
Does anyone else see utility in this idea? I’m not sure how much work it would entail.
I just came across this searching for information on a multilingual book. I’m working on an app of Bible stories in RAB and would like to add the national language translation under the vernacular. I’ll have an audio file of someone reading the vernacular but won’t have audio for the national language so that could complicate things. At the moment I’ve got my stories in Word files but if this is even possible in RAB, I guess I’d have to switch to standard format. Although from Ian’s comment above it sounds like this may be the time to start learning SAB!
@robolton You could instead put your stories into Bloom, then use RAB to turn them into bilingual talking apps. And because they are Bloom, you can trivially post the talking books to the web and take advantage of future publishing targets like video, facebook, embedding in your own web site, etc. Finally, you’d be moving towards a format that low-tech community members can use and own.
Thanks for this, John. I was wondering if Bloom was the way to go. I’ve just been learning it (not hard) the last couple of days and saw that it can easily do bilingual books. I’ll play around with this today.
I tend to stick to plain text sources. So I would start in SFM as it can be repurposed many ways. But not everyone can cope with this way.
Bloom is more structured but now has various outputs including into App Builders.
If you put two different paragraph styles on your two languages in your Word document then when you run audio sync you need to add changes to take out all of the national language lines so it only syncs on the vernacular.
Can anyone link to a Bloom example that is a diglot with vernacular audio? I’ve never made anything in Bloom before and I would like to see how it looks and works.
One of the features I like about RAB is the ability to choose the Songbook ‘mode,’ so that the user can sort by hymn number or name.
Maybe I can’t have my cake and eat it too. I’ll just have to consider the pros and cons of each option (SAB, RAB, Bloom) and decide what’s best.
