Lang. A:Lang B WAV File Generator (for Conf Talks)

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Stevieleep
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Lang. A:Lang B WAV File Generator (for Conf Talks)

#1

Post by Stevieleep »

I served my mission in Korea a few years back and, in an effort to not completely lose the language skills I gained there, I’ve recently I’ve been working on something that may have a broad appeal and application to other RMs and the missionary program in general. What I’ve been doing is taking WAV files of a general conference talk—one in English and the other in Korean—and methodically piecing together a WAV file that alternates English/Korean/English/Korean sentence by sentence.

While going through this process, I got to thinking that this kind of WAV file could have benefit to other RMs, Missionaries in training and in the field, Members who want to improve 2nd language skills, Missionaries’ English classes, etc. We could totally be killing two birds with one stone here: working on language skills and gospel study.

As I thought more and more about this, the idea that grew in my head was to have a tool created on the Church’s web site that would allow an end user to first select a Talk to parse and then select Language A and Language B from a list. The web site would then create a WAV file of the selected talk that alternates, sentence by sentence, between Language A and Language B (it could also produce a text file that does the same, if requested). The file could then be downloaded by the end user and utilized as they see fit.

The Church already has thousands of talks translated into various languages and puts considerable effort into doing so. The talks would have to be somehow marked/parsed by sentence so that a program could correctly pair up sentences and produce the requested WAV file. I don’t know if this could potentially be crowd-sourced or what.

Let me know if you think this idea has any legs and what I need to do to get the attention of the Church’s IT department to get something going. I’m new to this…
danpass
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Re: Lang. A:Lang B WAV File Generator (for Conf Talks)

#2

Post by danpass »

Cool idea!

Such a resource could also be helpful to someone who wants to develop or improve upon their skills as an interpreter, in addition to the church's existing resources.
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sbradshaw
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Re: Lang. A:Lang B WAV File Generator (for Conf Talks)

#3

Post by sbradshaw »

I'll bet programs already exist that can compare audio with a text transcript and automatically divide them into pieces. Then crowd-sourcing could be used to double-check. This technology would be useful in gospel study, for example in the scriptures you could have the mp3 marked up such that you can start at a specific verse instead of the beginning of the chapter.

For the LDS Music app (LDS Music for iOS LDSTech project), we have plans to annotate where each verse starts in a hymn recording so we can put "snap points" in the scrubber to jump to, say, verse 3 in the recording of a hymn. We haven't looked into automating it but were planning to just crowd-source it.
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