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scarletseasmoke t1_j2alq2h wrote

Reason: I participated in an academic competition, and the general quality of lyrics translations people submitted annoyed me, so I picked up a huge stack of bilingual poetry collections to study translations.

Level: I think technically just below "Independent user - complex" in English, that's maybe around B1-2. But I had French, Italian, German, Spanish in the mix (some with my native language some with English), and I spoke none of those four languages at that point, I used textbooks to figure out what's going on.

Why bilingual books? To see translations side by side and see what different translators prioritized

Finished? Yes, all

Other: If I had access to them, I'd have picked up novels, too, to learn the language. When my English was way too weak to read whole books I used to sit at the dining table with the original + a translation + dictionaries, it was a nightmare and I'd have preferred a bilingual edition. And in Italian and Spanish I couldn't even find full novels to read, it was sad (I could find them now I guess, at least with English translations, but we didn't have easy internet access back then)

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