This set of e-book and audiobook files was created by Marre Westerbeek, student translation sciences of Leiden University during her internship at KB. The idea was to create different versions of an e-book, to see how these relate and potentially could be presented in parallel. As original text, Marre choose a poem: "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost.
From this were made:
- a translated version in Dutch
- an audiobook version narrated by Marre herself
- an audiobook version narrated by computer (with a voice cloned by Marre)
- an ebook version with the audio in a media overlay (so that it could be read and played at the same time)
- an ebook with the translation side by side
- an ebook version which shows how braille is derived from the same text
Though certain adaptations were a lot of work, we expect that much of this could be done in the future by computer. Presenting text, audio, braille, translation next to each other could help not only users with a certain print impairment, but also be very interesting to study. Language shifts that occur in translations because of interpretation, are easier to spot if texts are presented in parallel, than if these are complete separate. A suggestion for future research would be to see how to automate the neccessary conversions and how to link two separate documents (html or audio) without adapting the originals themselves.
These examples are meant for inspiration. Please refer to this project if you want to use these in your own publications.