A Multilingual Experience
November 25, 2007
Link to the first eight pages of an album, in five languages
The comic strip technique allows for many things. I have used it to disseminate certain scientific and technical knowledge. This tool will take on growing importance when all the possibilities offered by the Internet are used: the various and varied links, interactivity, multimedia, animation. When I have a little time I will transform, for example, sequences of drawings present in a comic strip such as La Passion Verticale into animated gifs, into animation showing for example the different aspects of the operation of a helicopter rotor head.
There exists another facet, linked to the Internet, which makes it easier to learn foreign languages. We took an album from the middle of the batch, the one dealing with the conquest of space, entitled "Around the World in 80 Minutes," and we took its first eight pages, conjugated in five languages:
*- French
- English
- Spanish
- Russian
- Chinese*
If we had had the Arabic version of this album, these six languages would cover a good part of the planet. Alas, the Arabs have shown themselves to be very inactive in this translation effort. We have had many promises, but few have been kept. While Arabic comic strips beat all download records, just after French, we currently have only two of them. The Portuguese, for their part, are totally absent from the great adventure of Savoir sans Frontières and that is a shame, because their language is also spoken by a very large number of individuals. Little responsiveness also among the Indians.
Be that as it may, this experiment, on eight pages, conjugated in five languages, shows what can be expected from such a technique. The usefulness in the teaching of foreign languages is obvious.
It is possible, by creating active zones on the different pages, to make it so that by clicking on the "bubbles" one can hear the sentence pronounced, in the corresponding language. One then arrives at a technique of literacy, in an unlimited number of languages, using the albums as a medium, with the bonus of acquiring scientific and technical knowledge and a little dream and humor along the way. I know how to create active zones on an image and put a link that calls an mp3 file. On the other hand, I do not know how to bypass the window that will open, depending on the browser used. My friend Boland, to whom I owe the bits of knowledge I use in site management, tells me that the best technique would be to resort to FLASH software, at the cost of adequate programming. Users would then simply need to download the appropriate flash plug-in for clicking on the bubble to generate the utterance of the sentence, without an intermediary. These few lines of program would moreover be replicated on all the pages by simple copy-paste. The whole thing is knowing how to write them. If there are computer scientists who can give us a hand, they will be welcome.
But all this cannot be the work of two individuals, Gilles and me. Gilles works full time and plays his role as accountant on a volunteer basis. We are currently running at the rate of ten translations per month, on average. It takes time to integrate them into the site, which is my job, and more time to pay the translators and keep the association's accounts, which is what Gilles does. I will therefore make attempts with institutions such as UNESCO, the UN, various ministries, including the French Ministry of National Education. I believe we have now demonstrated the power of this teaching technique. We now need to be helped, and for this undertaking to be taken over by an institution or a private foundation. If I were freed from these management tasks I could devote myself more usefully to creating new works.
The transformation of existing works into "talking books" represents the processing of 12,000 pages. It is an undertaking that can only be taken on by an institution of international scope. It would moreover have the advantage of providing work to a number of cooperants, scattered throughout the world, just as currently Savoir sans Frontières, despite the modest sums paid for each translation, finds itself providing supplementary income to numerous translators residing in countries where wages are low.
Let us now move on to the experiment of a multilingual presentation. The boxes exceeding the number 3 will remain inactive. The management of these first eight pages of Around the World in 80 Minutes, in five languages, represented my day's work. By clicking on the link below you will land on page 1 (the cover page) of the French version of the comic strip. By clicking in fifteen other boxes of the table you will change either page, or language, or both at once, at will. The right-hand column, empty, awaits an Arabic translation. I suggest that an emir offer a larger sum for its translation. That might perhaps have a result.
We have provided a full-screen presentation. It will be noted that while preserving a minimum of legibility it would theoretically be possible, by using the horizontal and vertical scroll bars to the maximum of their possibilities, to present each page of an album in thirty languages at once, with the corresponding vocal utterances, which would represent a nice group effort, a way of uniting the men of the Earth in a peaceful and useful work.
Who will sponsor this undertaking?
Link to the first eight pages of an album, in five languages
December 13, 2007:
The technique of "Talking Bubbles"