Editing Parallel text (section)

{{short description|Text placed alongside its translation or translations}}
{{Distinguish|Parallel novel}}
[[File:Rosetta Stone.JPG|thumb|right|The [[Rosetta Stone]], a [[stele]] engraved with the same decree in both of the [[Egyptian language|Ancient Egyptian scripts]] as well as [[Ancient Greek]]. Its discovery was key to [[Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts|deciphering]] the Ancient Egyptian language.]]
{{Refimprove|date=May 2008}}
A '''parallel text''' is a text placed alongside its translation or translations.<ref name="Chan2014">{{Cite book |last=Chan |first=Sin-Wai |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=S0FWBQAAQBAJ |title=Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology |date=2015 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-315-74912-9 |location=London |language=en}}</ref><ref name="WilliamsSennrich2016">{{Cite book |last1=Williams |first1=Philip |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bd3dDAAAQBAJ |title=Syntax-based Statistical Machine Translation |last2=Sennrich |first2=Rico |last3=Post |first3=Matt |last4=Koehn |first4=Philipp |date=2016 |publisher=Morgan & Claypool |isbn=978-1-62705-502-4}}</ref>  '''Parallel text alignment''' is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The [[Loeb Classical Library]] and the [[Clay Sanskrit Library]] are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference [[Bible translations|Bibles]] may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; [[Origen]]'s [[Hexapla]] (Greek for "sixfold") placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side.  A famous example is the [[Rosetta Stone]], whose discovery allowed the [[Egyptian language|Ancient Egyptian language]] to begin being [[Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts|deciphered]].

Large collections of parallel texts are called '''parallel corpora''' (see [[text corpus]]). Alignments of parallel corpora at sentence level are prerequisite for many areas of [[linguistics|linguistic]] research. 
During translation, sentences can be split, merged, deleted, inserted or reordered by the translator. This makes alignment a non-trivial task.

Parallel texts may be used in [[language education]].<ref>Abdallah, A. (2021). Impact of using parallel text strategy on teaching reading to intermediate II level students. International Journal on Social and Education Sciences (IJonSES), 3(1), 95-108. https://doi.org/10.46328/ijonses.48</ref>