CH-ENG Reader: A Tool for Guided Chinese Reading through Parallel English Accompaniment

Abstract

Like other languages, Chinese requires constant practice and exposure to learn. Chinese web novels, a popular form of online media, come in a plethora of genres that provide readers a great way to understand Chinese culture and contemporary usages of the language. While there are online communities that translate these novels for English readers, there is currently no tool that puts the English version together with the original text. By aligning the two texts together at the paragraph level and providing Google Translate in an easily accessible form, CH-ENG is an online web-novel-reading application where English readers can not only appreciate the original Chinese text, but also have a helpful aid to improve their reading ability. Serving also as a resource for finding books of the appropriate reading level, this tool attempts to make reading Chinese novels in their raw form more approachable. For Chinese learners who are novel readers, this would not only help improve their language proficiency, but also allow them to later tap into the vast untranslated selections available online.