Volunteering

Translate

• Translate this page into Czech!
• Help finish translating the site interface into Czech.
• Help translate and review the Czech vocabulary guide. (You must be logged in to approve categories.)
• Help prepare interactive readings for speakers of your language by translating sentences and adding definitions to challenging words. The English history article needs to be translated.

Audio Integration

Language Guide is in the process of updating the archived guides. You can help in this process by re-ordering the sounds in the existing guides using audactiy, an open source sound editor. Send Tom an email if you're interested.

You can also contribute your voice. Ideally you should use a USB microphone or use a microhpone with an audio interface. Most computer sound cards aren't of sufficient quality to produce high quality recordings. It's best to coordinate with Tom if you're interested in contributing in this way.

Submit an interactive reading

• Submitting a reading

  Use the interactive reading wiki to submit the text of the reading. The wiki also allows you to associate a sound file with the reading and sound integrate it, but if you prefer you could leave that task to someone else. In some cases Language Guide might be able to record the audio for a reading. Feel free to contact me if you need help with this process or have any questions (please write in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese if possible).

• Finding readings - some ideas

  • Wikipedia articles can be a great source for interactive readings.
    I've created several readings from wikipedia articles. I simplified some of the language and made some sentences shorter with the goal of creating a reading with a 9th or 10th grade reading level. (If you paste the reading in the old version of google docs, go to tools, and click on "word count" you'll see the grade level based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.) I also incorporated material in from related articles. For example the Halloween reading consists of content from the main Halloween article but also material from the Samhain and Trick-or-treating articles. Finally I got rid of the academic and technical vocabulary with the goal of giving the reading a more conversational tone.

    -Tom
  • Many great stories and classics available are in the public domain. You can find them on sites such as Project Gutenberg. If you're feeling bold you could even try modernizing the speech to make the reading more pertinent to the modern language learner.
  • Copyrighted material can be used if permission has been granted (radio broadcasts can make for great readings). There is also lots of content that has been released under licences such as the creative commons that allows for its reuse.

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