Using the LARA platform to crowdsource a multilingual, multimodal Little Prince

Abstract

We describe an ongoing project, in which an informally organised international consortium is using the open source LARA platform to create multimodal annotated editions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince in multiple languages, so far French, English, Italian, Icelandic, Irish, Japanese, Polish, Farsi and Mandarin. LARA versions of the book include integrated audio and translations and an automatically generated lemma-based concordance, and are freely available online. We describe the methods used to construct the various versions. In some cases, work for a given language was simply divided by type, typically with one person adding translations and another recording audio. In other languages, we experimented with crowdsourcing methods, splitting the text into chapter-sized units and using the LARA platform to distribute these to multiple annotators, then combining the results at the end. Finally, we report an initial classroom study, where the French version was used by intermediate-level Australian students of French.