Translation Hints

An important part of learning with Duostories is to have the translation of a word in the story directly available. Therefore, when translation the story you also need to provide translation hints.

The system works as follows: you write the sentence in one line and the translation below:

[LINE]
> Jan is thuis met  zijn vrouw, Marian.
~ ~   is home  with his  wife   ~

The sentence will be split into words and each word will be matched with the word on the sentence below. If a word is translated with "~", no translation will be displayed for the word. This is used for names where there is not need for a translation.

The syntax highlighting will highlight words alternating in blue and green to help you see how it will perform the mapping.

Joining Words

Sometimes translations are more complicated than a one to one match of words.

[LINE]
Speaker292: Weet~jij    waar mijn lesboek Engels is?
~           do~you~know Where  my textbook English is

Here you can "glue" words together using the tilde sign ~. They are treated as one word for the sake of translation. So "Weet jij" will have the joined hint "do you know".

Words in the target language as well as the translation can be joined to create one to many, many to one, or many to many mappings.

Splitting Words

Sometimes languages do not separate words with spaces. A prominent example here is chinese script.

[LINE]
Speaker560: 我的|钥匙|在哪里？
~           my  keys (are)~where

Here you can use the vertical bar | (also known as pipe). Its the opposite of the title and splits words for the translation hints while it still appears without spaces in the final story.

Show Hints

With a click on the button you can show the hints displayed directly below each word. Especially when reviewing stories this is a great tool.

Pronunciation Hints

You can add an optional pronunciation hint line using ^ directly below the text (or below ~ if both are present). This works for pinyin and other pronunciation systems.

[LINE]
Speaker560: 我的|钥匙|在哪里？
~           my  keys (are)~where
^           wǒ~de yào~shi zài~nǎ~lǐ

The ^ line uses the same alignment rules as translation hints:

• use spaces to align tokens,
• use ~ to join words/tokens,
• use | to split words/tokens.

You can also attach pronunciation inline to a translation token by adding {...} in the ~ line:

~ ... sit~and~{いー~or~うぃー} ...

This keeps the translation hint as sit and and sets the pronunciation hint for that same mapped phrase to いー or うぃー.

Token alignment is shared with the main text, so each text token can have:

• a translation hint from ~,
• a pronunciation hint from ^,
• both, or neither (~ can still be used to suppress a hint for one token).

Pronunciation hints from ^ are shown directly above the words. Translation hints from ~ keep the existing hint behavior (hover in story mode, inline in editor hint mode).