This blog, yes, disappeared for a bit. The reason was that feedback indicated two "consumer" interests, interlinear short passage translations and the same format for longer works, as in novels and non-fiction/academic articles,. In addition, chatbots, as I have called them, and all manner of other AI translation options flooded the scene--the choices and developments became too much to manage.
My inability to keep up with the above as well as developing and testing my own modest server-side efforts based on what I then knew, and found wanting, well, you see why hiatus.
As of this date, with the help of advances in AI coding capabilities on offer and my own take on how sophisticated a product needed to be to meet the needs of what I have identified as the rest of us, I am back and have progress to report on several fronts (about that not in this post).
During the hiatus and now still, translation view (make 'em) tools and corpora of works/literature, other than scriptural--"interlinears" for the rest of us--are few and far between. Some noteworthy possibilities there are. For example,
What might be a reason for this? Something to do with reader purposes and comfort and efficiency. (See https://interlineardotworld.blogspot.com/2025/08/language-learning-and-translation.html)
The development a tools for creating/having one or another kind of interlinear translation view has evolved into two tech alternatives and a new set of options under the broad title of interlinear.
Accessible to all via web applications will be either client- or server-side solutions. (Earlier server-side solution proponents over-hyped and -promised their ways, which were many and in the final run proprietary! Silly and yikes!)
As of this writing, I have a basic client-side demonstration web app to share (see separate post). And I will develop a server-side solution that will take advantage of improved AI-assisted coding and the build-once, run-anywhere criterion (wish me luck).
Not finally, a proposed change in the rest-of-us categories for what we might find a best fit and more loosely construed notion of interlinear.
- line by line
- sentence by sentence
- word/phrase by word/phrase
- aligned
- inline
- per paragraph, over under
- from side by side to a form of interlinear
The original idea is represented by this early draft of the project, so-called, in '24.
Finally, a recent podcast by Grammar Girl having to do with AI and translation, she interviewed a Dutch translator. The short of it is , that according to the guest, ChatGPT is uncannily good at translating these days, and the job market for translators in the Netherlands and elsewhere is drying up, a trend that has increasingly been felt in Europe in the last three to five years. There is still room for proofreading translations, but this niche work has never earned the few practitioners sufficient money to live on. The guest interviewed by Grammar Girl indicated that there would always be a market for literary translators, for such textural art takes skills that AI still has not achieved, if we can say that AI possesses skills. (If curious, See what ChatGPT had to contribute to one of my literary efforts.)
Hiatus end. Onward.
